Dread Times

Te Hau

2011-12-01T09:25:00.001+13:00

Every day you change
your eyes now slate not
magnetite black
or dark as the infinite sky.
You are coming into your body
into this world
sharpening and shrinking
like light through a lens
a star coming into focus.

I cried when you were born
your body indescribably soft in my hands
as soft as the womb you were born from
"Once the head's out"
she says
"the feeling of the body sliding
down the birth canal
is amazing"

I'll never know but
I cried
because of the intensity
because of her courage
because you had come.

Post election thoughts

2011-11-29T16:37:00.001+13:00

National supporters in Epsom will be congratulating themselves for following instructions and voting for John Banks. Now that he has climbed through the electoral window, his support may be crucial to a compliant National-led coalition government.

It must have revolted National to depend on him after his weirdly camp cavortings during the campaign, a kind of Derek Zoolander crossed with Fifi the psychotic poodle, but surely no more than it revolted any of the liberals left in the ACT Party.

Still, it is almost two weeks until the results from the special votes are released and a fortnight is a long time in politics. The Green Party will be hoping that they are delivered their usual late election surprise and get to add another MP to their 13. Looking at the numbers it is not impossible.I would love to see Mojo Mathers in Parliament, both for her personal qualities and for the challenge that she would bring to the system as a deaf MP, but to be honest I'm not holding my breath. The political maturity that the Greens demonstrated in a focused, engaging and well run campaign means that they appeal to a broader section of the New Zealand public, but that they are less likely to be scooping up the last minute voters.

Me, I'm predicting the specials will favour Mana and New Zealand First. I say Mana because they have strong support among young Maori and first time voters. These were the kinds of people who in the past have enrolled late just so they could vote Green. Now they'll be enrolling to vote for Hone Harawira. My prediction is also based on a great deal of wishful thinking. There are few things in politics these days as guaranteed to bring a smile to my face as the thought of the formidable Annette Sykes in Parliament. It is not only Te Ururoa Flavell who will be dreading the idea.

New Zealand First was the big surprise result this election. There is no politician in the country who can do so much with so little as Winston Peters. Those who put his success down to memory loss among his older constituents misread the situation in my opinion. I recall seeing an interview with a young first time voter who said she'd vote for him because he was 'incorruptible'. Which is true if you think about it, in the same way that the Titanic now really is unsinkable.It’s not that elderly voters have forgotten what he is like, but that young voters never knew in the first place. What Winston most undeniably is, though, is a bloody good scrapper. He knows how to make politics a spectator sport, and for that he will always, it seems, be rewarded.

The party that I do not envy at all is the Maori Party. They face some very difficult decisions in the days ahead and even more so if the outcome of the special votes is that they actually become the king-makers.

If National has the numbers to govern without them, they will have the opportunity to distance themselves over the next three years. If they decide to remain outside a formal coalition they can still negotiate a confidence and supply agreement or, like the Greens, a Memorandum of Understanding and make policy gains while remaining free to oppose the Government on an issue by issue basis.And if they are genuinely unable to stop asset sales going ahead and do manage to get some kind of preferential deal for iwi, it's not just Maori who ought to thank them.

I should note here that I always felt the Maori Party had more opportunity to distance themselves from National than they allowed themselves, even as part of the previous coalition. As far as I could tell, the challenge that led to the expulsion of Hone Harawira from the Party was not that he opposed going into coalition but that he thought the Party had become too servile.

A good example that has since come back to haunt them was their support for National Standards – not just for the policy itself but their votes to allow the legislation to pass all its stages under urgency, avoiding public submissions. If they had been allowed, those submissions may well have warned the party of the danger that National Standards pose to schools like in Moerewa, where a hugely successful programme for Maori students is now threatened by closure.

If National does end up needing them for a majority, though, the challenge is more acute, especially over asset sales. During the election campaign the Maori Party was forced to clarify their initially ambiguous position by saying that the party does not support asset sales, but that they support preferential rights for iwi if asset sales cannot be stopped.Voting against asset sales if they did have the deciding vote would be consistent with their election promise but would put a huge strain on their relationship with National since Key has said that the issue is not negotiable. Given how important asset sales are to Key, would he threaten to refuse to form a Government if the Maori Party is unwilling to support them? Going through with such a threat would be a dangerous game indeed.

Up to now the Maori Party has been unwilling to seriously test their relationship with National. On the other hand this could be exactly the opportunity the party needs to address its strategic positioning. The astute position that the party took when it first formed, of non-alignment, has morphed into a perception that they steer to the right.In the last few days of the campaign the Maori Party recognised the danger and tried to reposition itself towards neutrality. If National relies on the Maori Party to form a Government after this election, taking an uncompromising stance on asset sales would be a way to win back a perception of independence and perhaps start to woo back some of the progressive Maori vote that the party has lost to Mana and the Greens.

from my 3news blog

Key's curious desire to talk policy

2011-11-19T00:19:00.002+13:00

It is refreshing to hear John Key demanding the media focus on policy in the election campaign. Curious strategy, since I would have thought National's policy platform was their Achilles heel but they do need to get away from the poor handling of the storm in a teacup.

National has relied heavily on John Key's easy-going charm, using things like RadioLIVE’s 'politics-free' Prime Minister’s hour and a presidential-style campaign, and Key's overreaction to what should have been a minor affair hurts his brand. Ironically, the party which has expended so much effort to play up Key's personal characteristics now has to convince people to shift their gaze.

Which is a good thing. It would be nice to think the election might be decided on what the political parties plan to do if they become government, rather than which of the leaders we'd rather have round for a barbie. Anything which takes us closer to that goal has my support. This is especially true in the context of an on-going global financial crisis, looming oil supply constraints, accelerating environmental degradation and increasing frequency of extreme weather events due to climate change..

National has been criticised for being on the “smile and wave” plan when it comes to economic management. In my view that is unfair. National does have a clear plan for the future, which is to strip mine the country.

From Key's enthusiastic support of Solid Energy's plan to dig up lignite (the lowest value and dirtiest type of coal) and convert it into briquettes, urea and diesel, to his secretive meetings with Anadarko boss James Hackett this week, one of the companies involved in the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spill, to his on-going commitment to dig up the conservation estate, National remains committed to coal mining and deep sea oil drilling, despite this putting at risk the natural environment that is so fundamental to our national identity.

Similarly, National intends to strip-mine Aotearoa's wealth by partially privatising a number of State Owned Enterprises. This will turn a sustainable income from the returns from those shares into a one-off payment, effectively giving Key's government (if elected) a chunk of money to spend but leaving a short-fall for future governments to make good. As with deep-sea oil drilling, National seems prepared to sacrifice the future well-being of the country for a short term cash boost.

What makes it worse is how National intends to spend the money. A significant portion of it will be spent on education and health – which is a bit like selling the tractor to pay for school fees. Education and health spending are basic budget items that should be paid out of income. It would be lunacy to sell income-generating capital to pay for them.

The rest of the money will go on subsidising farm irrigation. This will speed up the expansion of dairy farming at the very time when we need to put limits around it.

Creating taxpayer-funded artificial profits for farming (which are increasingly owned by corporations rather than families) prevents diversification of the economy by preventing more efficient land use in marginal areas. It also speeds up the killing of our lakes and rivers and makes it impossible for us to pull our weight in international efforts to prevent catastrophic climate change.

The problem voters face, of course, is where else to turn. Labour has taken a bold step in announcing a range of courageous policies that begin to take it back to its base.

Phil Goff is looking more attractive to the public when he occasionally manages to relax at bit and stop trying so hard. The fact that most of Labour's best ideas are actually samples of long time Green policy may be a good or a bad thing depending on how one looks at it, but what Labour lacks in my view is coherence. Labour needs to be clear about its vision if it wants to be convincing, and it may just be too soon after its foray on the right to do that.

The party that does have a coherent economic policy, one that actually grapples with the realities of the 21st century, is the Greens, which is why they seem to be on a trajectory to becoming the main opposition to National. Let’s just hope they get enough votes this election to prevent Steven Joyce and Gerry Brownlee doing the skinhead moonstomp all over Aotearoa New Zealand.

Read more: http://www.3news.co.nz/Keys-curious-desire-to-talk-policy---blog/tabid/419/articleID/233219/Default.aspx#ixzz1e3SnSVyl

My (late) representation to Parliament on the Video Camera Surveillance (Temporary Measures) BIll

2011-09-29T14:30:00.003+13:00

The Chair
The Justice and Electoral Committee
Parliament Buildings
Wellington
29 September 2011

RE: VIDEO CAMERA SURVEILLANCE (TEMPORARY MEASURES) BILL

Dear Chester and the members of the Justice and Electoral Committee

Firstly, I appreciate that the closing date for representations on this bill was yesterday. However given that the public was given just one day to lodge a view, I hope that you will consider receiving this brief late addition.

My views are as follows:

1. I totally oppose this bill as unnecessary, inimical to good policing and as offensive to justice and the rule of law.

2. I urge the committee to report it back to the House with a recommendation that it not proceed.

UNNECESSARY

I sat on the Justice and Electoral Committee from 1999 until 2008. During that time the committee scrutinised the Evidence Bill (now Act). The very lengthy consideration the committee gave to section 30 (2) is what informs my view that this bill is simply not needed. As you well know subsection 2 (b) states that

“if the Judge finds that the evidence has been improperly obtained, (they must)
determine whether or not the exclusion of the evidence is proportionate to the impropriety by means of a balancing process that gives appropriate weight to the impropriety but also takes proper account of the need for an effective and credible system of justice.”

It is simply not credible that the judiciary will let serious accusations go undetermined, given their obligation to give proper account of the need for an effective and credible system of justice. The fact that the Supreme Court decision that led to this bill allowed the improperly obtained evidence that was the focus of appeal, be admitted in the prosecution of 4 of the defendents demonstrates that there is no need to violate the doctrine of the seperation of powers by retrospectively legitimising police activity.

INIMICAL TO GOOD POLICING

The Law Commission report into search and surveillance powers had put the police on notice that the legality of the use of covert filming was questionable. The fact that the police continued to rely so heavily on these techniques demonstrates an attitude to the law that is careless at best.

Retrospectively legitimising this activity holus bolus rewards such an attitude and makes a powerful statement to the police that they can be haphazard in following the law when it comes to gathering evidence. The only real sanction that exists to keep the police within the law, and in conformity with the intentions of Parliament when it enacts laws proscribing search and surveillance powers, is for improperly obtained evidence to be excluded in court. I find it hard to believe that the intention of this Parliament is to condone police impropriety.

OFFENSIVE

It seems extraordinary that a country that purports to be a democracy that respects the separation of powers and the rule of law can contemplate passing retrospective validation of illegal police video surveillance, under urgency, with a select committee process lasting one week and with one day for the public to prepare representations. I do not think I need to spell out further to this committee why
this bill and this process is offensive to justice and the rule of law.

CONCLUSION

I offer thanks in advance in the hope that the committee has agreed to accept this late representation. I urge the committee to send this bill back to the House with a recommendation that it not proceed and with a report that spells out clearly why this bill is ill-conceived and offensive.

Emergency surveillance law shows the Crown has too much power

2011-09-29T14:21:00.002+13:00

New Zealand is not a democracy, if by that we mean government for the people, by the people. This was proven to me beyond a doubt when I was sworn in as an MP for the third time in 2005. MPs are required to swear allegiance to the Queen and her successors before they can take part in the Parliament. When I tried to add “to the people of Aotearoa New Zealand and the Treaty of Waitangi” (Parliament's true sources of legitimacy) I was forbidden to do so. MPs allegiance must be to the British Crown alone.

I was neither the first nor the last MP to attempt to add something meaningful to the oath, but it was a personal reminder about who the Parliament serves. Allowing New Zealanders to elect the people who serve the Crown in this country fools us into thinking that those representatives are there to serve us. More importantly, it obscures the lie that is at the heart of our constitution – that the source of political authority is the Queen.

The Parliament only sits after it receives Letters Patent from the Queen giving it the power to do so. Every Act passed through Parliament has to be signed off by the Queen, or her proxy the Governor General, before it becomes law. Regulations are actually Orders in Council from the Queen or the Governor General, made on the advice of her Minsters. Within our system, the Queen is the very source of political power and legitimacy.

This is not just abstract political theory. It distorts our very thinking about what the Government can and can't do. It is the reason why New Zealanders have so few real protections from the State, protections that would limit the power of the Crown. It is the basis for the Governments ability to sack an elected council in Canterbury and replace it with hand chosen appointees, or forcibly take over the administration of the waterfront from Auckland City. It is what allows the Government to seriously contemplate passing a law under urgency to legalise police surveillance that the courts have already ruled was illegal and that the police were repeatedly warned about. It was what allowed the last Labour Government to steal huge areas of land based on the ethnicity of its owners with the Foreshore and Seabed Act. The power of the Crown trumps the rule of law.

If we were a real democracy, our political system – our constitution – would be based on the recognition that sovereignty flows from the people, not from a monarch (and a foreigner at that). It would embody the idea that political power flows upwards. Sovereignty begins with our right as human beings to make decisions over our own lives. We express it in the collective decisions we make as communities. Elements of it can be passed on to the national parliament and to the regional and global governance bodies that we collectively choose to take part in.

A New Zealand democracy would be based on the Treaty of Waitangi, which reinforces the local decision-making rights of hapu over the things that affect them. In the Maori language version of the treaty that the chiefs and Governor Hobson signed, Maori never ceded sovereignty to the Crown. The idea that the Queen is the sovereign power is simply incompatible with the tino rangatiratanga of hapu. That is why the courts have had to invent the “principles of the Treaty of Waitangi” in an attempt to sidestep the international legal doctrines that give priority to the Maori language version.

A real New Zealand democracy would provide protection for all its people from the arbitrary use of power by the State. It would safeguard our human and civil rights from those given enforcement power over us, such as the police, prison system, customs, and increasingly food and medicines regulators. At present New Zealanders have no constitutional protection at all. It is only the lack of a simple majority due to MMP that has slowed the Government from ramming through an emergency retrospective law to give police carte blanche powers of video surveillance.

Finally a real democracy would not have local councils made and unmade by the whim of the Crown, but as expressions of people's inherent right to make decisions at a local level over the things that affect them at a local level. The ability to sack a properly elected council and replace it with Government appointees is an outrage, made possible only by a distorted view of political legitimacy and power.

New Zealand will become a republic sooner or later. The real question we need to ask ourselves, though, is much deeper. Does the power of our Parliament come from some person because they are more divine than the rest of us, more imbued with wisdom and justice? Or rather does it come from the people and their inalienable right to rule their own lives, and their choice to bestow on the Government the ability to make decisions in the best interests of the nation? Once we have decided that, eveything else will become clear.

Take prosecution power away from police

2011-09-08T17:21:00.002+12:00

A young man I know was in court recently. He and some friends were drinking round the back of a sports club and they decided to smash a window. It was typical dumb drunk stuff and they deserved to get caught. He didn't deserve a conviction for attempted burglary, which was what the police charged him with.

I asked the police prosecutor how he justified an attempted burglary charge when the window was visibly barred and impossible to enter. He said that if the window hadn't been barred he was pretty sure the kids would have tried to get inside.

I don't need to mention that the young guy was Maori. Of course he pleaded not guilty, on the reasonable basis that he wasn't trying to burgle the place, he was just being a vandal. The case dragged on for about a year, wasting police and court time and costing who knows how much money. Eventually, frustrated over police delays and deferred proceedings, he pleaded guilty on the promise of a community sentence. I guess you could call it conviction by attrition. If the charge had been willful damage or some such, however, there would have been a guilty plea and the case could have been dealt with straight away.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

For me it was just another example of why prosecuting practice needs to change. The case didn't make the national news, but it illustrated the point just as well as the infamous case of the autistic light bulb collector Cornelius Smith-Voorkamp. Mr Smith-Voorkamp was accused of being a looter, detained in custody for 11 nights (and his partner for 6 weeks) and prosecuted for 6 months before the case was dropped in August. All for taking two light bulbs. Then there is the case of singer Tiki Taane who was charged in April with disorderly behaviour likely to incite violence. He sang the NWA song 'Fuck the police' while police were in the club he was performing at. The case was dropped this week but it is hard to avoid the suspicion that the police deliberately wasted months of court time and fistfuls of public money for a bit of personal revenge.

The Minister of Justice Simon Power, like Justice Ministers before him, has recently introduced changes to the legal aid rules in a bid to cut costs. It's time his officials pointed out to him that a more effective, although less populist, way to cut spending on lawyers, as well as get the courts running more smoothly, would be to crack down on ridiculous prosecutions.

The problem is that the police seem to lose perspective. That's understandable – they are in the thick of things. But it means that we cannot rely on the police to not prosecute matters that just shouldn't ever go to court. It means we cannot rely on the police to always lay charges that are in proportion to the offense that was actually committed.

That's without even mentioning those cases where police perjury is involved, http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifsuchttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifh as when then-senior constable Neil Robert Ford caused a traffic accident, lied about it and persuaded a to blame the victim. Shane Cribb, 17, was charged and found guilty. Mr Cribb and his supporter Steve Potter spent 5 years fighting for justice. After it was over Mr Potter said that he worked out what really happened within days of the accident. He commented that "If I could see what was gapingly wrong, why couldn't the authorities? That's the thing that I really still struggle with."

This case also demonstrates that the police find it hard to make objective decisions when it comes to prosecuting police officers who may have broken the law. The failure of the police to prosecute Constable Abbott after he shot Steve Wallahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifce dead in Waitara in 2000 is another example. The family had to bring a private prosecution before the legality of that killing could be tested, even though the courts found there was a case.

We have to take prosecuting decisions out of the hands of the police. We need an independent Public Prosecutors Office with responsibility for deciding when to prosecute and what charges to lay. The job of the police should be to investigate crime, interview suspects and gather evidence. Having a prosecutors office which can then evaluate the evidence without any prior stake in the case would clear the crap out of the courts as well as give citizens a bit more protection from malicious prosecutions. Who knows, it might even have saved those Operation 8 defendents who have just had their cases dropped after four years of legal hell.

from my Monkeywrenching column 8 Sept 2011)

Te Tai Tokerau by-election

2011-06-22T15:27:00.003+12:00

I've always thought that calling the Te Tai Tokerau by-election was a mistake for Mana. Not because of the cost to the country, which is insignificant in the context of what it costs to have a democracy. I thought it was a mistake because of the costs to the party.

Firstly the Mana Party has few resources. While almost the entire Te Tai Tokerau section of the Maori Party seems to have gone straight over to Mana, its bank accounts probably didn't.

Even in terms of human energy, it is a big ask to expect party activists to run a by-election and then have to run the general election campaign straight after. Door-knocking, mailbox drops, stalls and billboards take a lot out of a branch.

Added to this, the Labour Party is free to give the by-election its undivided attention in a way that it could not do in a general election. Especially this one. While the Labour machine may not cut a lot of ice in Ahipara it has certainly made some headway in the southern, more urban end of the electorate. Getting those votes back takes a level of grunt that Mana may not have.

Perhaps most importantly, at this stage in its life Mana needs to be building its organisation, its membership, its policies and its processes, not getting itself bogged down in a skirmish in the North. At the Mana Party launch I challenged the party to avoid becoming the kind of political party that revolves around one man, by building a truly national organisation with strong collective leadership. That means Hone Harawira getting around the country, building branches, shoulder tapping candidates and organisers and inspiring people to get involved. It also means getting the principles and policies of the party clear.

It is by doing this that Mana has the potential to become a potent political force. My hope for years has been to see a third political space open up in New Zealand parliamentary politics, where a combination of small parties is able to challenge the duopoly of National and Labour. As a greenwing activist and commentator it seems obvious that the core of that third force would be the Greens, an independent Maori voice and a genuine left party. Mana has the potential to fill more than one of those spaces, if it is able to bring together the Pakeha left and progressive Maori in the way its launch suggested it might.

Instead Mana is using its time to prove that Hone Harawira has a mandate to be the MP for Te Tai Tokerau. Honestly, I don't think anyone doubted it. In fact (with the benefit of hindsight) it seems obvious that a by-election would be unable to improve on the assumption most of us already had - that support for Hone in the electorate was virtually unanimous. All a by-election could ever do was weaken that assumption, which of course is what the polls have now done. I'm pretty confident that Hone will win on Saturday but he will probably never again look as unassailable as he did before the by-election was called.

That is not to say there have been no benefits for Mana in this race. Hone has been generally acknowledged the winner in his various debates by mainstream political commentators. His political style has had some of the rougher edges knocked off in the tumble of the campaign and the more exposure he gets, the less of a caricature he becomes in people's minds. That undermining of the irrational fear and loathing that many Pakeha have will be useful in the longer term.

But whoever takes the seat on Saturday, Kelvin Davis will consider himself a winner. He has represented the Labour Party well. He will be an MP either way and even if he does not take the seat he will be the man that almost knocked out Hone Harawira on his first run. It seems he is, as he says, a born politician and I'm sure it won't be long before the press gallery starts calling him Labour's rising star and speculating on his leadership prospects. Which is kind of why I'm rooting for Hone – the born activist and shit stirrer. Who Hone represents is those people who rarely get represented in the New Zealand colonial parliament.

Greens step forward

2011-06-08T15:16:00.002+12:00

I still have the photos from the day in 1998 that the Green Party left the Alliance. It was the day I joined. I'd refused to become a member before then as I couldn't stand the kind of old left politics that the Alliance represented and I couldn't understand why the Greens would continue to yoke themselves to a party that despised them. Just as I could never understand why we yoked ourselves to the Labour Party when I was an MP, a party who despised us no less.

So I was happy to see the Greens finally take an independent stance on post-election negotiations at this weekend's conference. The Greens have said that they will attempt to work constructively with, and challenge, whichever party leads the government after the November elections but that anyone who wants Green support would need to make “significant progress on Green Party environmental, economic and social policies and initiatives” before that could happen. In conclusion, it is unlikely, but not impossible, that they would support a National-led government, and it is possible, but not certain, that they would support a Labour-led government.

Cue the hyperbole. Bomber says its about loyalty, although he doesn't explain why the Greens owe Labour any loyalty in the first place. Paradoxically, he also says that while he “believe(s) in everything the Greens have ever said and done when it comes to policy” voting Labour would be a better choice. He remains conspicuously silent on how he reconciles this with Labour's record on all the issues he holds dear. Sue Bradford attacks the Greens for “taking a step towards the right". When you see the political world in monochrome then of course black, white, and shades of grey are all you have to describe it. The Greens have always been more colourful than that.

The Greens can be described as 'left', just as the colour of a puriri tree can be described as 'dark', but not adequately so. The Greens have an uncompromising commitment to fairness and equality. They also have a commitment to individual rights and to limitations on the power of the State, but I wouldn't describe them as 'rightwing' either. What I would say is that by rejecting the left / right dichotomy as inadequate to describe Green politics, the Greens become free to adopt what is valuable from either end of that spectrum and evolve it in accordance with their own philosophies. Some people on the left would say there is nothing valuable to be found on the right, and vice versa. That kind of locked-in thinking is exactly the problem. Being 'green' identified provides room for finding creative, holistic, solutions to current social and environmental challenges.

The post-election negotiating strategy is not about the Greens commitment to the 'left' in any case, but their (lack of) commitment to the Labour Party. Labour has time and again shown that it prefers going into coalition with just about anyone but the Greens. Only the Maori Party and Hone Harawira seem more distateful to them. The Greens continuing to pledge themselves unreservedly to Labour would indicate a distinct lack of self esteem and political nouse.

To my mind there are a number of reasons for the Greens new approach. The first is simple negotiation tactics. Only a fool gives their commitment to a deal before negotiations have begun. Actually it is worse than that. In the past the Greens have said only that they won't support National to govern. While they never promised to support Labour, their commitment has always included the recognition that they would have to support Labour if Greens held the balance of power. Allowing National to govern by withholding support from Labour would be as bad as actually voting for National. Labour knows this. What the Greens have done in the past, then, is to guarantee a deal with Labour, before seeing any terms, but only if Labour can't find anyone better. That is what various spokespeople for the left would have the Greens keep doing, it would seem.

The other reason is that sooner or later a child has to let go of mama's skirt. Given the sad state of the Labour Party right now, it seems an appropriate time to do so. The Greens announcement at the weekend does not indicate that they are about to support National to form a government. In fact it suggests the opposite. What it does say is that the Greens are finally standing on their own two feet.

Bringing the Maori Party back from the brink

2011-01-31T17:50:00.004+13:00

Tomorrow the Maori Party has a chance to pull back from the brink, when Hone Harawira and Te Ururoa Flavell meet at Taheke Marae in Rotorua for the first time since Mr Flavell made a formal complaint against his colleague. To do so, though, will take a much more skillful handling of the conflict than the party has shown thus far.

The key question is whether either side actually wants to pull back anymore. I doubt Hone wrote the column that preceeded all this with the intention of splitting the party, but he may now be beyond caring. What is clear, though, is that the leadership of the Party has been trying to force him out for a long time. Over a year ago I wrote about how a rumour campaign had been started against Mr Harawira (well before the 'white motherfuckers' email) that seemed intended to undermine his support base. More recently rumours were being circulated in the party that he was considering leaving the Maori Party, including giving impetus to the speculation that he might team up with Sue Bradford and Matt McCarten.

In trying to oust Harawira, though, the difficulty that the party faces is not just that he is a hard man to take out. Mr Harawira does represent an important strand of opinion in the party. I have spoken to Maori activists all over the country – at tangi, at hui and at celebrations – who have volunteered their dissatisfaction with the direction of the party and their intention to vote Green this election if things don't change. In particular they highlight Metiria Turei's intelligent, articulate and principled outspokenness on things of concern to Maori – including an array of environmental issues such as mining – and they wonder why the Maori Party has so often remained silent.

The Maori Party leadership might respond that these criticisms are unfair. That the party has achieved a number of important successes for Maori as a result of their relationship with National. Many mainstream Pakeha political commentators would agree. The real judges of whether the trade-off has been worth it, though, will be Maori voters come election time. And not just voters. One of the factors in the Maori Party's success thus far is the enormous energy and enthusiam of its activists. It is those activists, the election harvesters, that are starting to down tools, pack up and go home. If the party loses their support it will still survive but in my view will go into decline. Rather than winning all 7 Maori seats as I once hoped, it is likely that they will start to lose seats.

Hone will no doubt win Te Tai Tokerau should he choose to contest it as an independent. The speculation that he might lead a newly formed Left party (or even more bizarrely join a Left party led by Sue Bradford) is no more than wishful thinking in my opinion. That rumours continue to swirl says more about the lack of confidence that such a party could get elected on its own merit than anything about Mr Harawira's intentions. That is not to say that I would not love to see a genuinely Left party in the Parliament. My long term hope has always been for a coalition of Greens, Browns and Reds to between them make up the dominant partner in a Government.

Having said that, the best thing for the Maori Party, and for Hone Harawira, in my view is to resolve their differences. That means finding some new accomodation between them that recognises both their need to honour their commitments and maintain their relationship with National and their need to honour the voice of their own people and maintain a clear distance from National. In particular the influence of the Iwi Leaders Group on policy, a cause of dissatisfaction among many supporters, needs to be opened up for debate.

If the Maori Party, and Mr Harawira, can achieve this then they will have done something extraordinary. The biggest challenge for the Maori Party has always been to balance the interests of its diverse constituency. If they cannot, and Mr Harawira is forced to leave, then they will have failed that crucial test.

Wikileaks

2010-12-13T13:08:00.001+13:00

There are different kinds of heroes. Some are people who are just in the wrong place at the wrong time but who rise to the occasion. There are the quiet heroes who sacrifice to give their children a better start, the parents who break the cycle of abuse so that their children never have to endure what they did. There are professional heroes – fire fighters and ambulance operators. People like Police Inspector Mike O'Leary, who risked his life and suffered severe burns to rescue two children from a burning vehicle. These are the people we celebrate.

But there are those who bear as much emnity as acclaim. People who put themselves on the line in order to expose the truth and challenge power. The danger these people face is not from random natural events, from enemy soldiers or dangerous criminals. The danger they face is from their own governments and its allies, their armies, their police forces and their secret services.

One of these is Julian Assange, the Australian-born founder of Wikileaks which last week released 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables into the public domain. The cables have already proven to be highly embarassing both to the US Government and to others. They show the US spying on its allies and on UN officials, including taking iris scans, DNA samples and fingerprints from foreign officials. It shows the US Government condoning corruption and human rights abuses in “friendly” governments and using its diplomatic power to advance the interests of US corporations. It shows collusion in torture.

You may ask what is new about any of this. We know that the Whitehouse's rhetoric on 'freedom' and 'anti-terrorism' goes hand in hand with funding terrorists and supporting dictators. What these cables provide, though, is self incriminating evidence of the corruption at the heart of American foreign policy. It is worth reflecting on the role that the Waihopai spy base plays in this, as the New Zealand Government prepares to persecute the 3 men who helped pull the cover from that place almost 3 years ago.

Of course Mr Assange isn't sounding much like a hero after being accused of various sexual offenses in Sweden. He is currently detained in Wandsworth Prison, London after being refused bail and is being held almost incommunicado. On Wednesday, according to The Guardian, he was allowed one 3 minute phone call with his lawyer.

Rape accusations should not be belittled. Women face major obstacles to get justice in the courts, especially in Sweden. However I can't help noting some suspicious elements to the case. First, no charges have been laid. He is only wanted for questioning. The allegations led to a police arrest warrant in August but it was rescinded a day later by a senior prosecutor. Apparently she said that she believed the women, she just didn't feel what happened was a criminal act.

It is hard to see how Assange can be denied bail and extradited just so he can attend a police interview. Katrin Axelsson of 'Women against Rape' has remarked at the unusual zeal of Swedish and British authorities to pursue Assange. “There is a long tradition of the use of rape and sexual assault for political agendas that have nothing to do with women's safety” she writes. “Women don't take kindly to our demand for safety being misused, while rape continues to be neglected at best or protected at worst”.

According to media reports the USA has already talked to Swedish authorites about on-delivering him to the USA, where media commentators are calling for him to be assasinated and the Justice Dept is talking about espionage charges. Given Sweden's compliance (documented by Wikileaks) in delivering prisoners up for torture to Egypt under US pressure, it seems unlikely they would refuse. What remains to be seen is whether making a martyr out of Assange will weaken Wikileaks, or just make it grow.

(from my Waikato Times column 11 Dec 2010)

Pike River - Hard Coaled Facts

2010-11-29T14:01:00.002+13:00

The bodies of the Pike River miners haven’t even been recovered yet and the industry PR has begun. Days before John Key’s announcement of a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the disaster, the Chief Executive of the Canterbury Employers Chamber of Commerce was on National Radio talking up the economic benefits of coal mining for the West Coast. On the same day the Grey District Mayor Tony Kokshoorn was saying that business at Pike River needs to continue. Commendably Pike River Coal itself was more circumspect, saying that the focus for now is the families.

Most New Zealanders would agree. The nation watched alongside the families as the tragedy unfolded. People spoke about it in their lunch rooms and over cups of tea. We waited to hear the outcome, hoping to be able to celebrate some unlikely good news. We felt the shock and sadness of the families at the news of those 29 deaths. Now our thoughts and prayers are with them as they farewell the departed, those they love who have returned to the Oneness of all things.

There are always lessons to be found in death of course - reminders of how short our time is in this life, how unpredictable the end. I feel for those whose last words to their beloved were harsh and angry, an overspill of some small irritation now made completely irrelevant. I think about the personal legacy each man left, unknown to me, but alive in the hearts of friends and family, of times shared together, of gestures of love, friendship, generosity and solidarity. The stuff that really matters once you are gone.

In one sense, though, these men’s deaths are part of the price paid for coal. Coal mining IS dangerous. There are many things that can be done to manage and mitigate risk but we are deluding ourselves if we think we can have coal without some people dying for it. Just as we are deluding ourselves if we think we can sustain our petroleum addiction by drilling in ever more difficult and dangerous places without suffering more marine catastrophes. Fossil fuel addiction, like P addiction, has little regard for its collateral damage.

The real destruction from continued coal mining, though, will be the deaths it causes outside the mines rather than inside them. As the world meets this week in Cancun to have another go at trying to avert a climatic disaster, there is growing concern about feedback loops such as the methane from thawing Siberian permafrost. The other big concern is the impact that coal is having on the climate – especially as the reality of peak oil hits home.

Conventional oil production is already plateauing and will begin to dwindle. At the same time increasing demand will push prices up to record highs (prices will be erratic but the trend will be upwards). One of the likely responses will be an increase in the use of tar sands and coal-to-liquid fuel to fill the gap. In fact New Zealand’s own government owned Solid Energy has just such a plan to convert lignite coal to diesel. The world cannot afford to keep burning coal even at our current rate, never mind increasing its use through these mad schemes. At the same time the coal industry’s great hope of Carbon Capture & Storage is being increasingly discredited.

Let’s be blunt - it is time to end the coal industry. It is important that we properly acknowledge the deaths of the 29 men at Pike River, but in the end there is a bigger question to be decided than mine safety.

Waste to diesel

2010-11-15T17:27:00.000+13:00

One of the worst things I have ever smelled in my life was a rotting pumpkin. We'd spent the summer travelling around Aotearoa in my van and it had accompanied us the entire journey. Coming back through Taupo someone picked it up by the stalk intending to use it in a soup, but the little handle pulled off with a wet slurp to reveal the decomposing putrescence inside. The only good thing about that day was that no-one managed to spill the contents of the curcubita all over the upholstery.

I was taken back to that unpleasant event last week at the presentation of a new report into household organic waste. It's been known for some time that one of New Zealand's big waste / resource recovery issues is the kitchen waste going into landfills. This and other organic waste is the main source of methane emissions going into the atmosphere from landfills (3 percent of NZ's greenhouse gas emissions) and a major source of toxic sludge out the bottom.

The stupid thing about it is that, like most of the stuff going into landfills, kitchen and green waste is a valuable resource if properly processed. By simply composting food and garden scraps, for example, it is transformed by an amazing natural alchemy into rich, fertile soil. Applied to agricultural and horticultural land it adds nutrients, builds topsoil, increases earthworm counts and healthy microbial activity, increases the water holding capacity of soils and boosts yields. Since New Zealand loses a significant amount of topsoil each year it seems amazing that we don't already do it.

Unfortunately New Zealand's waste stream is mostly locked up by multinational corporations who make money by trucking rubbish to landfills and burying it. Foreseeing the rise in environmental awareness, and an increase in reuse and recycling, they have been preparing for the future by locking councils into long term contracts that guarantee waste volumes for their tips. They often use their monopolistic position to bully smaller councils into signing contracts that more or less prevent the introduction of comprehensive recycling services.

Luckily there are a number of New Zealand operators who take a more responsible approach. Many people are already aware of the stunningly successful efforts of the various enterprises making up the Community Recycling Network and the huge environmental, social and economic benefits they bring to their local communities. They and other New Zealand businesses are demonstrating that taking environmental and social responsibilities seriously makes for better business practises.

So I was eager to go along to the report launch and hear what other options there are when it comes to kitchen waste. The report was written by Eunomia Research for Greenfingers Garden Bags / Earthcare Environmental Ltd and Envirofert Ltd and develops a cost / benefit analysis for household organic waste. It looks at what best practise councils do around New Zealand, what different authorities do overseas and models a variety of options for New Zealand to see where the greatest benefits are likely to be found.

In the end what seems to give the best outcome is a weekly kitchen waste collection and a fortnightly other rubbish collection. Food scraps makes up the bulk of most people's residual rubbish (after recycling) and if that is collected separately then the residual rubbish is halved. Smell is probably the biggest problem with a fortnightly pick up, but if the food scraps are gone this shouldn't be a problem. The presenters demonstrated a neat sample kitchen caddy for the bench, with a locking lid to keep out pests and with watertight, breathable compostable bags for a liner.

The costs to implement such a scheme are minimal, given the other savings to be gained from reducing frequency of residual rubbish collection and savings in landfill charges. The research suggests that a substantial consumer surplus can be gained from composting the waste in this way instead of landfilling it. When organic waste is composted it is broken done by aerobic (air loving) bacteria. This means it either has to be turned regularly or to have air forced into it. The main by-products are carbon dioxide, heat and plant food.

Even better than composting, according to the report, is putting the waste into am anaerobic methane digester. Anaerobic digestion is when anaerobic (air hating) bacteria break the waste down. The byproducts of that are methane (a powerful greenhouse gas), heat and plant food. This is what happens in a landfill, and even with methane capture most of the methane goes into the atmosphere. In a digester all the methane is captured and can be used as a natural gas for burning, or can be turned into diesel to run vehicles. This is being successfully done overseas.

So we can turn the country's kitchen waste into diesel and run all the rubbish trucks on it, instead of letting it rot in the landfill and pollute the ground and the atmosphere? That's worth getting on to your council about!

Death by stupidity

2010-10-30T17:31:00.002+13:00

One of the things I love about Aotearoa is that our forests are pretty safe. They do eat people ocassionally but it's rare. The taniwha in the rivers do too, now and then, but people usually know where the danger spots are. What we don't have are a dozen varieties of venomous snakes, scorpions, lethal spiders or large people-eating carnivores. I guess an angry pig could do some damage if it caught you unawares, but it's not something trampers are likely to worry about.

All of which, I guess, makes the tragic death of Rosemary Ives all the more aggravating. The idea that a person could be accidently shot while brushing her teeth before heading off to bed at a DoC campsight makes me angry as hell. My immediate response was to “throw the book at the bugger responsible” for being negligent with a lethal weapon, for shooting near a public campsight, for 'spotlighting' from the road and for just being a dick. The fact that 2 other similar incidents were reported over the same weekend just added to my disgust.

A Hamilton man, Andrew Mears, has now been charged with careless use of a firearm causing death and I welcome that. His lawyer says that his family wishes to meet with Ms Ives' family to express their sympathy but have been advised that it is too soon. I have no doubt that Mr Mears and his family are completely shattered by this event and I hope that they do get an opportunity to express their sorrow to the Ives' face to face because it may help soothe that family's terrible, irreparable loss.

But I am beginning to wonder what good 'throwing the book' at anyone would actually do. If Mr Mears is convicted, what use would there be in putting him in prison? It won't affect his likelihood of reoffending. To be honest I'd be surprised if he could even bring himself to pick a gun up again. Neither will it have any deterrent effect. Anyone stupid enough to hunt in the dark near a campsight by spotlighting from a vehicle is clearly not thinking about possible consequences – to themselves or to others. If the possibility of killing someone isn't enough to dissuade them, the length of the sentence if they do is unlikely to have an impact.

There are three issues that a real justice system would need to address, in my opinion. The first is how the family and friends of Ms Ives can find some peace in the midst of their grief. A restorative justice approach seems to me to be much more likely to deliver that than the standard cold court system and I hope they are given the chance to consider it and support if they wish to use it.

The second is to hold the culpable person responsible. Again, a restorative justice conference where the killer has to face Ms Ives' family and look them in the eyes would be a lot harder, and a more powerful way of taking responsibility, than time in prison.

The third issue is how do we prevent, or at least lessen, this kind of moronic behaviour in the future? Hunting accidents are not THAT uncommon, although usually it involves hunters shooting other hunters, often their friends. If people faithfully followed the Arms Code that they are tested on when they apply for a gun license this shouldn't happen, but I suspect that some people treat it like a school test – learn it enough to regurgitate on the day and then forget about it.

The Deeerstalkers Association is urging all hunters to learn from the bad practises that led to Ms Ives' death, but I wonder whether a more systematic approach is called for. The question is, how do we make people understand when they get a gun license that carelessness really can lead to them killing someone. How do we get them to really think about that? Our current licensing procedure doesn't even try. Perhaps a compulsory viewing of the confessions of convicted hunter-killers would help bring the lesson home.

(from my Waikato Times column 29/10/10)

Ankle tapping MMP

2010-10-05T15:05:00.001+13:00

I was quite impressed with the way John Key tried to ankle tap MMP a couple of weeks ago. He never actually came out and said that he wants to get rid of it. Instead he told us, the public, that this is what WE are thinking. We just needed a little help to work that out.

It was a brilliant tactic. It allowed him to take a stab at our electoral system while leaving room to about-face if the political dynamics and focus-group opinions change. It sounded like he was on the pulse of the nation, but committed him to nothing. John Key may be relatively new to parliamentary politics, but he's a natural.

Key has tried from the beginning to portray himself as an impartial adjudicator in the MMP debate. He is only holding a referendum because that is what the public want. It is 'the people', rather than John Key, who are now questioning MMP as a result of the ACT party's self-destruction. I'm not saying they should or shouldn't take that view he told us. This begged the question of exactly which 'people' he was referring to. The answer came a week later. Leaked minutes showed that his chief of staff had been talking with Peter Shirtcliffe about pushing the Supplementary Member (SM) system as an alternative to MMP.

Peter Shirtcliffe, for those that don't know, was the main figure behind the campaign to derail the MMP referendum in 1993. He was chair of Telecom at the time, and realised that a more democratic voting system is a threat to corporate profits. He managed to get more donations from his big business buddies than Labour and National combined, which is telling in itself, and the combination of big money and deceptive advertising almost took the referendum. Nevertheless people power won the day in the end.

To be fair, John Key probably was a bit agnotic about MMP while ACT remained a viable political partner. While an outright majority would make it easier for National to ram free market fundamentalism through parliament (which was one of the reasons we got rid of FPP in the first place) he was quite comfortable knowing that he could rely on ACT for support on one side and the Maori Party on the other. This provides a lot of scope for a centre-right politician, with the bonus of having a coalition agreement to blame for unpopular policy initiatives in either direction. With ACT gone at the next election, as seems likely, Key now has only one direction to lean. National must be burning offerings in thanks that the referendum planning is already underway.

So expect to see more undermining of MMP by the National Party up until the election. It's not without its own risks for them though. Drumming up concern about the influence of small parties under MMP may grow a mood for change, but a return to FPP, or a move to SM, may not bring that to an end. Getting rid of MMP will probably spell the end of some small parties, but one in particular will be the big winner. The Maori Party has five MPs by virtue of its electorate vote. Party votes add nothing. With the other small parties gone, it is likely that Labour and National would both be reliant on the Maori Party to form a government on a regular basis. Far from ending the influence of small parties, a move to a less proportional system would probably just give the Maori Party a monopoly.

I suspect that is not what Peter Shirtcliffe had in mind.

(from Monkeywrenching)

Peaking oil

2010-09-15T16:23:00.001+12:00

For a country so dependent on importing and exporting we are amazingly relaxed about the state of the world's oil supply. The report into 'peak oil' by the German military leaked in Der Spiegel last week barely rated a mention in our mainstream media. Neither did the British government's Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security report. Both made sobering reading.

Let's be clear - no one is saying that the earth is running out of oil anytime soon. In fact 'peak oil' refers to the peak of production, when we are producing the most we ever will. The problem is that production will then start to decline at the same time as resurgent powers such as China and India seek a bigger share. Oil prices are likely to become very erratic as speculation and recurring recession drive demand up and down, but the basic trend will be a permanent oil supply crisis with fossil fuels becoming very expensive.

The likelihood of this and its implications are what the two reports were attempting to explore. The British reports warns of a supply 'crunch' in the near future and says that we need to act now to prepare. The Bundeswehr report warns of shifts in the global balance of power, a decline in importance of the western industrial nations, a "total collapse of the markets" and of serious political and economic crises. Both reports stressed the urgency of the situation that we face.

Up until a couple of years ago discussions around peak oil were never heard among ‘hard-nosed’ business people or politicians. It was only the extremist freaks that kept trying to bring attention to these issues – hippies, greenies, geologists. Now, like on so many other issues, fringe opinion is being adopted by the mainstream.

(As an aside, wouldn’t it be nice to see some acknowledgement of the hippies? I’m sick of seeing guys in power suits talking about the environment and then saying “but don’t think I’m some kind of hippy” as if we would ever mistake their boring old arse for one)

It looks like peak oil is here, although we won’t know the precise moment until it has passed. Globally we go through just over 30 (US) billion barrels of oil a year, but for the last ten years new discoveries have amounted to around 10 billion barrels a year. We have already got most of the easy to get stuff and now we are going after the rest. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is in some ways a predictable outcome of our oil dependency as we source our oil from increasingly more remote oil fields, employing more complex and inevitably riskier production techniques.

However there does not appear to be any energy source capable of fully replacing oil, and neither are we making the investments now that would be needed to even attempt to do so. In Aotearoa the government is still ploughing money into road building while neglecting the transportation systems that will survive the end of cheap oil – rail, coastal shipping, walking and cycling. There is even talk about spending some $20 million to put a tunnel through the Kaimai’s to carry road freight (hat-tip Mark Servian). I can’t help wondering what that money could do if we invested it in trains.

One thing for sure is that the end of cheap oil will hit us all hard. Fossil fuels power our food production systems and its distribution. Transportation, materials production, international trade, construction... basically everything will become a lot more expensive. There is a lot that we can do to begin preparing for the end of the oil age, and many communities are already getting started. While we cannot maintain our current lifestyles, we can maintain or even improve our quality of life. We just need to do the kinds of things that hippies have been talking about since the 1970’s – energy efficiency, localised economies, waste reduction, passive solar building design, walkable cities, and a focus on building communities rather than making more stuff.

Despite the government’s wilful negligence on this issue we have a choice – begin to make the transition towards a low energy future or ignore the problem and watch Rome burn. Personally I’m not waiting for the politicians.

(from Monkeywrenching)

Ecological overshoot

2010-09-13T19:20:00.001+12:00

Last week the human species went into debt. Not financial debt, but in something far more important – the service flows of the environment. Money is just something we made up, useful but ultimately illusory. If we go into ecological debt, on the other hand, there is no government or lending establishment that can bail us out. There are no appeal rights against the laws of nature.

It's a simple idea. Think of it like a business. If it spends more than its income, eating into its capital, it will eventually go bust. A family budget is the same. If times are hard you may have to spend some of your savings on groceries and rent but sooner or later you have to learn to live within your income.

Natural resources are the same. We cannot continually take more resources than the environment can regenerate, yet most wealthy countries live far beyond their environmental means. If everyone in the world lived like the average American we would need the resources of at least 5 planets. For the UK it is 3.4 planets, and New Zealand is probably somewhere around there. The per capita consumption of China is estimated to be close to one planet living.

I personally don't aspire to the lifestyle of the average chinese, so I'm interested in how we reduce our consumption without losing our quality of life? Which begs the question of what it is that makes the 'good' life. It's something that we don't seem to much ask ourselves these days, obsessed as we are with living the 'big' life. We have locked ourselves into a growth frenzy that makes us work harder for less happiness. Most people have less time to spend with their family or their friends, less time to walk along the river bank or share a meal together and less financial security despite the economic growth of the past few decades.

Much politics is focussed on cutting spending on the things that make people happier in order to boost spending on things to increase economic growth. It is assumed that this will make us better off, although there is no evidence to think so. In my opinion, it is time that we began to invest in infrastructure to improve the well-being of our people. Not because it will boost tourism, not because studies show that happy citizens are more productive, not because it will give savings in the health sector, but simply because it will make us all better off in the only terms that really matter – enjoyment of life.

One of the candidates for Hamilton City Council, Mark Servian, has said “A community is a home, not a business, so council spending decisions should be based on 'cost-benefit', NOT 'profit-loss'. Neither a household or a firm can let itself go broke, but the city is first and foremost where we live our lives. The council is our shared project for making our collective home much more pleasant”. I agree. It is a pretty bleak vision that sees pavements, drains and rubbish as the only things councils should be interested in. In my view we will learn to live within our ecological means by living better lives and local councils have a major role to play in that..

One obvious strategy in Hamilton is to invest in making it a more walkable, cyclable city. With our flat streets, our gully system, our river banks and our parks it is hard to imagine a place better suited for it. This could be combined with a functioning passenger rail service to Auckland and better cycle and public transport connections to outlier towns to make getting around a joy rather than a source of road rage. I wouldn't be the only one that would be both happier and greener because of it.

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/earth_overshoot_day
http://www.bettertransport.org.nz

(from my Waikato Times column)

Miscarriages of Justice and what to do about them

2010-08-27T14:40:00.001+12:00

There is no such thing as a perfect justice system, where the guilty are always convicted and the innocent acquitted. In fact the most heinous mass murderers, the tyrants and warmongers that decide the fate of nations rarely even stand trial. Justice, like truth, is a journey rather than a destination.

One traveller on that road is Professor Graham Zellick, who has been in Aotearoa recently to talk about the UK Criminal Cases Review Commission. This was set up in 1997, following some high profile cases in the UK, to review possible miscarriages of justice. His talk was both informative and compelling, partly because New Zealand's justice system is a part of the 'common law family' that stems from Britain and is subject to many of the same problems.

That problems exist in the New Zealand appellate system is not news. Public disquiet remains about a number of high profile convictions. Other verdicts, such as Arthur Allan Thomas, David Doherty, Alec Waugh and David Bain have been overturned after lengthy terms of imprisonment. It was concern about such cases that led retired High Court Judge Thomas Thorpe to conduct a self funded investigation into miscarriages of justice and recommend that New Zealand establish a body like the UK CCRC.

Appeal courts find it very difficult to correct certain kinds of problems in the court system. According to Zellick, this is partly due to an excessive confidence the system places on jury verdicts. Appeal courts are happy to look at questions of law, procedural issues and the like. They are very reluctant to look at questions of fact and say that the jury simply got it wrong.

One of the ways that juries can be misled is through expert witnesses. Zellick spoke about the case of Sally Clark in the UK who was imprisoned for murdering her cot-death baby, mostly on the basis of now-discredited theories of a Dr Meadows. As he spoke I was reminded of the FBI evidence that was so crucial in convicting John Barlow, evidence that has now been shown to be wrong.

Although it is not a point he made, it also seems likely that juries give unwarranted attention to certain kinds of evidence. Contrary to common sense, two of the biggest causes of wrongful conviction (as evidenced by DNA based exonerations) are confessions and eye witness identification evidence that most ordinary people would expect to be reliable.

The UK CCRC gets about 1000 applications a year, refers 30 - 40 cases back to the courts and about 70 percent of those result in a conviction being quashed. This is all at a cost of around £8 million. The Scottish CCRC, serving a population of around 5 million people, costs about £1 million. When you consider that it costs about $90 000 to keep one person in prison for a year then a CCRC in Aotearoa might well save us money, if effective justice is not a strong enough argument for the Government.

Currently in this country once appeal rights have been exhausted all that remains is an appeal to the Crown for the prerogative of mercy. According to Zellick, this is a bit muddled in New Zealand. The prerogative of mercy is originally a power that the Crown has to overturn a conviction or to commute a sentence. Under the Crime Act this has been changed into an ability for the Governor-General in Council to refer a conviction back to the courts. In practise it is a decision of the Cabinet, which is constitutionally undesirable. The process has been described as ad hoc and inadequate by at least one QC.

Certainly the prerogative of mercy has not provided any benefit for most of the cases where it seems likely or possible that the conviction is unsafe. Note that this does not necessarily mean that the person can be proven innocent, but rather that their conviction cannot be sustained by the evidence. Our system requires proof "beyond reasonable doubt" in criminal cases and it is questionable in number of cases whether this threshold was ever reached. Peter Ellis, John Barlow and David Tamihere are all cases that in my opinion should be looked at by an independent body.

Even more compelling is the case of Scott Watson, who was convicted for the murder of Olivia Hope and Ben Smart in the Marlborough Sounds in 1999. Having read a reasonable amount of different material about the case, I am convinced that not only is there a miscarriage of justice but that Scott Watson is innocent. Unfortunately he, and the others, seem unlikely to get justice until New Zealand has an independent, transparent body to look at alleged miscarriages of justice and do something about it when it finds then.

Suicidal tendencies

2010-08-12T21:12:00.001+12:00

I’ve got my own theories about the high rate of suicide in New Zealand (and most of the western world). To my mind we need to address the alienation, the atomisation and the anomie of modern life if we want to get to the roots of the problem. In addition I find it hard to believe that at some level we don’t all feel the ecocide rending the planet. We are part of the fabric of life, despite the illusion of separation, and cannot be mentally healthy while we continue to wreak destruction on ourselves.

Such thinking was not, I suspect, behind the Chief Coroner Judge Neil MacLean’s call for more media reporting of suicide. He pointed out that while the number of people dying from suicide is 50 percent higher than the road toll, suicide receives comparatively little attention. In this he is correct. The money spent on reducing the road toll is considerable, with public media campaigns and strong enforcement around drink driving and speeding. Suicide prevention is small fry in comparison.

It is hard to understand why this is so. Suicide is not a new problem. Perhaps there is an assumption that it is primarily a youth problem. I don’t mean to be indelicate, but young people only draw significant political attention and ministry resources when we can blame them for shit. There has been far more media time, mental energy and government money spent on boy racers than ever was directed at suicide prevention.

An indication of our collective lack of interest is the fact that an international expert on suicide prevention, Annette Beautrais, left the country just a year and a half ago because of what a colleague described as a lack of support and recognition from the NZ Ministry of Health. Even more telling, the Associate Minister of Health with responsibility for the area, Peter Dunne, didn’t seem to be aware of this.

The media, of course, will blame the politicians for the lack of reporting. The Coroners Act does restrict reporting of suicide to some degree, but this is a bit of a cop-out. The Coroners Act says that if a coroner has found a death to be self-inflicted, no one can make public anything other than the name, address, and occupation of the person concerned and the fact that the coroner has found the death to be self-inflicted. Unless you have the coroner’s permission. They can only give that permission if it is unlikely to be detrimental to public safety.

Given the contested evidence about the effect of media reporting, this seems a good thing. It is a cautious approach that leaves the door open if the evidence stacks up against the notion of ‘copy cat’ suicides. In addition it is the Chief Justice who has responsibility to draw up guidelines for coroners about what may or may not be detrimental.

Strangely you’d never guess this from Judge MacLeans comments. I agree that more reporting is probably a good idea, but it is in his hands to allow this to happen.

Secondly, the restrictions are only around the particulars of specific deaths. There is absolutely nothing to stop the media covering the broader issue of suicide such as trends, research and causes. In particular more coverage of how to spot the warning signs and what to do about it if you do would be helpful. In fact the extensive coverage of suicide in The Press this month is a good example of just what can be done under the current law.

There are many laws that do need to change in this country but this is probably not one of them. Let’s see what we can do with what we have before we start demanding another act of parliament.

In need of a radical localism

2010-08-06T16:34:00.002+12:00

Apparently local body elections are coming up soon, although most people would never know. Some of the more imaginative candidates in Hamilton are getting up to all kinds of interesting stuff, but chances are the turn-out this year will be as low as every other local election. Which suits those in power quite nicely.

I can understand the lack of interest. The thought of going to a council meeting kind of makes me cringe inside, even though I know that local councils have more influence on the day to day lives of ordinary people than Parliament does. A lot of my constituency work as an MP was either doing pycho-therapy or explaining to people why I couldn't do much to help them because it was a COUNCIL ISSUE. Even then, I'm not sure it ever inspired them to vote for their city councillors.

More recently there has been another reason to be disinterested in voting in local elections. The sacking of Environment Canterbury and its replacement by a government picked board was a complete travesty of democracy, removing democratic representation so farmers could seize water resources more easily. The fact that the people of Canterbury won't even get to vote for their regional council this year just adds to the injury. The reorganisation of Auckland's goverance to allow the city to be run by business people for business people is a similar usurption of democracy.

The problem stems from our colonial history. In Europe power tends to be more localised because nation states grew out of the federation of independent cities and provinces. Local power often has constitutional protection. In New Zealand the nation states was enforced from the outside and it was highly centralised from its inception so as to facilitate our exploitation. Simply put, we were designed as a farm for England rather than as a democracy. The source of political power is not seen to be the people, but rather the Crown. While we no longer farm for Britain alone, we are still a commodity producer. Efficient production remains a more powerful political imperative than the right of local people to have a say over the things that are important to them.

Some of the most interesting social developments in Europe have resulted from the exercise of local power. The Dutch quasi legalisation of cannabis, for example, began with a decision by a local prosecutor not to prosecute for cannabis. The resulting policy has been so successful at reducing drug related harm than it has been adopted in most of Holland and increasingly in other parts of Europe too. In New Zealand such a development would be impossible. Here we have centrally controlled pilot schemes, with all the political arse-covering that this involves. If successful, they usually have the plug pulled on them in short order so as not to threaten any entrenched interests.

Because power is seen as flowing down from Her Majesty, rather than originating in the people and flowing up to the Parliament, local bodies provide no constitutional constraint on the Government. As we have seen, the Government can sack councils at will. Neither is there any overarching constitutional constrain on the Government. The Government can pass any laws it likes, even if they breach basic human rights, so long as it has the requisite majority. Our system is very much a product of that brief moment in time when the Nation State was all powerful in Europe – just forged out of autonomous provinces and city states but not yet constrained by regional or global systems of goverance. We are frozen in time.

The question is, which do we value more highly - efficiency or democracy? It has become heretical to question any demand of the market, as if the desires of human beings are legitimate only insofar as they facilitate the economy. We have been enslaved by our own invention. The answer, in my opinion, is a radical localism and it begins with a participatory local politics.

(from my Waikato Times column 6 August 2010)

Maori Language Week

2010-07-27T14:29:00.001+12:00

By Nandor Tanczos

You can't force people to learn to speak Maori. Actually, you can't force people to do very much at all in the long run, which is why the PR techniques pioneered by Dr Goebbels remain such a popular means of social control.

No, Maori speaking will become more widespread in this country for the same reason that most immigrants learn to speak English: you can't be a fully functioning citizen of this country until you can speak the languages of the land.

You can get by of course, as did those old aunties I knew as a child, who had come out from Europe at an advanced age and who struggled to say more than the basics in English. Many of them spoke multiple European languages but that didn't help much in New Zealand in the 1980's so they stayed within their ethnic enclave, lived long and happy lives and never understood the country they now lived in.

What separated them, and I think most Pakeha, from the unashamedly monolingual and the proudly ignorant that I occasionally come across these days is that they understood it as a weakness. They would have changed it if they could.

I think that a growing number of people feel that about Te Reo today. It is embarrassing for both Maori and Pakeha to go on to a marae, to hear the kuia open the ceremony and lay down the kaupapa of the day with their karanga, to hear the kaumatua follow the women with whai korero, to hear the hapu stand and sing ancient chants in support, full of history and whakapapa and wisdom, and to not understand a word of it.

It is embarrassing to sit stony-faced as the assembly roars with laughter over the banter and the barbed jokes. It is discomforting to stand and mouth words to songs you don't know as the people around you fill the air with rising harmonies and deep booming notes. It is most of all disturbing to realise the extent of ones own cultural ignorance and incompetence.

For most of us that realisation of ignorance leads to a desire to learn more so as to understand more. For some others it creates a defensiveness and a retreat back to the comfort zone. Perhaps that is why some people continue to determinedly call Taranaki mountain 'Mt Egmont', continue to butcher simple Maori phrases or seek to make a virtue (and political capital) out of their refusal to spell place names correctly.

It's just the frightened child inside them, feeling lost in a complex world. Nevertheless the fact that many of us are less able than a toddler when entering a Maori environment is not really our fault.

Luckily Maori people tend to be extraordinarily forgiving of even quite serious unintended offences. They know that our education system does little, by and large, to prepare New Zealanders for the social reality of living in Aotearoa today, where the ability to walk confidently in both worlds will increasingly determine our ability to participate and succeed.

Most of us, I think, welcome this new reality. We live in Aotearoa, in Polynesia, and we reflect that in our food, our lifestyles, our attitudes and in the maorified English that we increasingly speak.

What is also clear is that, as with many other indigenous cultures around the world, the Maori worldview has something of great importance to offer a human population increasingly alienated from the natural world of which we are a part.

This is not to romanticise or wish away the many problems that Maori society faces, but simply to recognise that Maori people, after killing off the moa and irreparably changing the New Zealand environment, learned over time to live in balance with the natural ecosystems of this land and much of that knowledge remains. Pakeha culture has not yet done so, and has much to learn from tangata whenua in this regard.

Maori Language Week is a good time to acknowledge this, to do a stocktake of the state of the language and for people to pick up a few more words and phrases to bring into their lives. Hopefully it will also renew that desire in a few more of us to become true bicultural citizens.

(from Monkeywrenching)

What are universities for?

2010-07-19T18:39:00.002+12:00

Right now we need sociologists more than we need scientists. We need philosophers more than we need forex traders. We need activists far more than we need accountants. There has probably never been a more important time in human history than now to stop and have a good think about where we are going, as we begin to reach the environmental limits of our planet. How predictable, then, that our government should this year launch a renewed attack on universities, and in particular on those disciplines that might help us to do so.

Reflective thinking has, of course, rarely been encouraged by governments or the corporations whose interests they serve. Universities are fine as long as they are churning out lawyers, accountants and managers, grist for the mill, but philosophy and the humanities have long been viewed with suspicion. So when Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce indicates that he wants to make a university degree nothing more than a glorified trade certificate he is simply articulating the logical outcome of decades of tertiary education policies from both Labour and National.

University student bodies were centres of dissent during the heady ‘70s when many of our senior MPs were cutting their political teeth. The children of western affluence had begun to question the point of it all, to ask fundamental questions about what makes 'the good life'. Was material accumulation all there was? How many people would we sacrifice to maintain it?

Interestingly, a number of studies suggest that it was around this time or slightly earlier that economic growth in the west stopped correlating with increased well-being. Those hippies were on to something. For whatever reason though, and there were many, that momentum came to a halt. Politicians ever since have wanted to make sure it doesn't happen again.

The student loan scheme radically changed New Zealand universities. After 1990 students and policy makers alike increasingly viewed tertiary education as essentially vocational, simply in order to justify the graduate debt that accompanied it. The result has been a burgeoning of the business and law schools while humanities have been in decline. Clearly this isn't happening fast enough for the current minister, who now suggests that tertiary funding be linked to employment outcomes. This was a bad idea when it was applied to Youth Training Schemes (YTS) in the 1990's. It's an even worse idea applied to universities, polytechs and waananga today.

The most unconvincing element of all this was the minister's explanation.

"This will send a strong signal to students about which qualifications and which institutions offer the best career prospects - and that's what tertiary education has got to be all about," he said.

The second part of that statement is almost certainly his actual opinion, but to suggest that cutting funding to philosophy is the best way to let students know that they will earn better money from an LLB is just insulting.

Students are well aware of their career prospects, that's why most of them are getting a tertiary education in the first place. Let's be frank - this is about the minister wanting to influence what kinds of things get taught, despite his bald denials.

Which brings us back to the question of what is the point of a tertiary education anyway? Of course we need vocational training we need skilled doctors, teachers, electricians and plumbers. But we also need philosophers, historians, critical thinkers and questioners and to my mind we need them more urgently.

Humans have become extraordinarily good at doing all kinds of things, but we seem to have stopped asking why we bother. The fundamental economic rationalism that informs this government, that sees education and culture and the conservation estate for that matter - as valuable only insofar as they serve the economy, is a profoundly depressing philosophy. That it is out of step with the thinking of most New Zealanders should make the minister pause.

Climategate - no one looks good

2010-07-09T18:52:00.002+12:00

No one comes out of the “climategate” email saga looking good. Not the political hopefuls who jumped on the band wagon. Not the sceptic bloggers who allowed their conspiratorial paranoia to get the better of them. Not the climate change sceptic movement generally, whose more extreme members perpetrated a far more vicious kind of bullying and intellectual fraud than they accused their opponents of. Not the scientists at the centre of the saga, who acted to hide data and frustrate those they saw as 'outsiders'. Certainly not the journalist who, in a show of age and banality, appended the tired suffix “gate” to the damn thing.

The third independent review of the emails leaked from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, like the Oxburgh Report and the UK House of Common Science and Technology Committee Report before it, has largely cleared Phil Jones and the other scientists there. It found that their honesty and rigour as scientists was not in doubt. It found no evidence of any behaviours that would undermine the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). What it did find, though, was a lack of openness and an unhelpful and defensive approach to requests for information.

The more serious accusations, such as that researchers cherry picked and manipulated data to achieve the results they wanted, were rejected. The famous 'hockey stick' graph, which shows relatively flat global temperatures for the past thousand or so years and then a spike beginning in the 20th century, was called into question by an email which spoke of using a “trick” to “hide the decline”. This was not a decline in actual global temperatures but in a proxy measure (tree ring data) from the 1960's on. From that time tree ring measures cease to follow actual recorded temperatures and there is a suggestion that pollution is the cause. The report looked at this matter and concluded that the “trick” (of adding in the real temperatures) was used in the sense of 'neat technique' to combine proxy and actual temperature measurements. While the original paper that developed the graph, and the IPCC use of it, had extensively discussed the uncertainties around it and the problem of the divergence of tree ring and actual temperature measurements, the report was critical of its use without these cautions in a World Metereological Organisation report.

Those who had hoped and expected to see the entire edifice of global warming theory come tumbling down as a result of these emails will be in shock. This was probably their best hope of swinging the public debate and it failed. They will be looking for something that makes sense of this result and no doubt some will choose to blame an ever widening conspiracy. The idea that it may be because the evidence actually points to climate change being real is for some people unthinkable. Human history is littered with the corpses of those that would rather die than give up their beliefs.

My hope, though, is that we are able to do something more profound with this moment than lapse back into our respective camps and either gloat or glare. The majority of people are not actually signed up members of any camp in this debate. There is growing concern about climate change because the majority view of scientists seems to be that it is occurring, as a result of human activity, and it carries huge risk for us all. That view has been unaffected by these email leaks, and in fact may become more explicit as scientists respond to the lies and intimidation of some extremists revealed by this saga. But there is also growing concern about what looks like a loss of objectivity among some researchers. The defensiveness and obstructionism among CRU scientists that the emails reveal is unacceptable. If anything, they feed the concern that some scientists are trying to hide something.

One of the failings of the green movement has been in not understanding that people can question the science and indeed the politics of climate change without being anti-science or a cypher for the oil industry. Perfectly reasonable people have perfectly reasonable questions about it and treating them as the enemy is not helpful. Indeed if this saga shows anything, it is the need to depolarise the debate. It may be that the insular tribalism shown by the CRU was a direct response to the aggressive and personal attacks upon them, but it was an unhelpful approach. You don't fight fire with fire, but with water. The challenge for us all, to echo the report, is to find ways to have good public debate that allows the scientific to be discussed, in all its uncertainties, so that people have a better understanding about what we know and what we do not. That problem is, of course, not limited to this issue.

Part of that discussion needs to also be about how we deal with climate change. The National Party made a good start last year with its public consultations but then seems to have ignored them. In my view part of the cynicism about climate change science is driven by the blatant attempt by big business to snatch atmospheric property rights. For example the New Zealand Emission Trading Scheme seems unlikely to do anything to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions since consumers, taxpayers and foresters (bizarrely) are being forced to subside our biggest emitting industries. Its easy to see why some think the whole thing is a scam.

The other issue that the saga highlights is the growing tension between social media and privatised science. All through the western world we have seen a relative disinvestment by governments into science and research and therefore the increasing importance of privately funded science, joint venture research and an emphasis on the commercialisation of research by public institutions. As a result we have seen the growth of interest in, and jurisprudence around, intellectual property rights. How this affects the openness and verification of scientific research is an important discussion. I recall questioning New Zealand's own ESR some years ago about what research they were relying on when they made claims about the efficacy of drug testing in the work place (they were in the process of introducing it into New Zealand on a large scale) to be told that the research was commercially sensitive and therefore not open to scrutiny.

All this is in contradiction to the dynamics of the internet, where everyone expects access to everything and the right to comment on it. While this can open the floodgates to the distasteful, the distorted and the dishonest it can also harness the power of people in the same way that distributed virtual supercomputers harness masses of home PCs . It may be an uncomfortable notion to those who are used to beavering away in a corner of a university with little scrutiny except from their peers but in a world where the myth of value-free and outcome-neutral science and technology is dissolving away, it offers an important opportunity bring some democratic oversight to bear on science. In drawing the importance of this to the attention of scientists, climategate has indeed been a gamechanger.

Rhythms of Life

2010-07-09T11:43:00.000+12:00

Death is the ultimate yard stick. If there is anything that can measure the value of our brief personal existence, it is when we fold back into the totality. Death is the supreme perspective and although its lessons are unwelcome and painful we all have to learn them sooner or later.

I've been getting a lot of lessons from death recently, although I'm not sure I'm actually any wiser. The most recent was at the funeral of Jan Abel – my good friend's mother, herself a friend I should say. I listened to the service, to the memorials and recollections and they made a vivid impression on my mind. She was a strong, courageous and spirited woman, an adventurer who, in her youth, had ridden a white horse across the Sahara. Yet I imagined that even in her final moments those days had felt to her like yesterday, just as my own misspent youth feels to me today.

The generations, it struck me, come in waves both rapid and relentless. The rolling rhythms of life that see us change from babes, to children, to young adults full of life and trouble, to pillars of our families, then to wise old heads and death go so quickly that we barely have time to figure out the game before its over. Those waves began long before we got here and will continue long after we have passed away and it is those waves, not the water itself, that defines the human experience. We may drive cars instead of walk and we may play playstation instead of cards but the things that matter the most remain unchanged, making a mockery of our egos and our status.

Does anything remain of us after we die? We can speculate on whether the soul lives on or simply dissolves back into the energy of the universe but to argue about it is pointless. We will all know soon enough. We can build religions around our hopes and desires in an attempt to find a solution to death, but there is no solution, there is only acceptance.

We do know that we live on in a sense, in the memories of the living and in the coiled strands of DNA carried by our descendants. When I listened to the eulogies for Jan and the memories that people cherished it was clear that they were about who she was, not what she had. They spoke of the love she showed to others – not just her family and friends but through her work with the Child Poverty Action Group. Her love lives on in those touched by it, a much preferable form of immortality to cryonics

I don't imagine that Jan had many regrets about her life. She made mistakes, as we all do, and had done what she could to repair the damage. She was blessed to see her granddaughter born, to see the new wave begin its rise and rush towards the shore. I imagine that as she looked back upon her life, with death at her shoulder, she was pretty content.

Not all people are, of course. Perhaps the famous mid life crisis comes from suddenly being confronted with the lessons of death, as we begin to bury our parents and friends. In the East this time of life is traditionally associated with taking up a spiritual practise. In the west, where aging and death is often seen as an enemy to be vanquished rather than a part of life to be accepted, it more often takes the form of an attempt to flee death's approach. Men in particular are reknowned for trying to rejuvenate the plum tree by cutting off all the branches, but death cannot be outrun. Death is not a competitor, but a counsellor.

(from my Waikato Times column 9/7/10)

GE clover like pulling a Cat out of a Hat

2010-06-15T18:11:00.000+12:00

When I heard AgResearch today announcing a breakthrough in the genetic engineering of white clover I was reminded of Dr Seuss. Not his explicitly environmental classic 'The Lorax' so much as 'The Cat in the Hat Comes Back'.

I still remember the sense of panic in the book as a pink stain in the bathtub grows bigger and badder from the grotesque attempts by various cats to clean it up, until it has turned into a major disaster.

The attempt to fix greenhouse gas emissions by genetically engineering clover for pasture fills me with a similar sense of alarm.

There is no doubt that something needs to be done to address New Zealand's agricultural emissions. New Zealand has the 11th highest per capita emissions in the world and around half of that comes from agriculture, in the form of methane and nitrous oxide.

The massive growth and intensification of dairy farming is pushing that contribution up, both by cutting down forest carbon sinks to grow pasture and by converting relatively low intensity sheep and beef farms into high intensity dairy farms.

On the face of it, then, genetically engineering white clover to reduce greenhouse gas emissions seems a good idea. By identifying and then manipulating a genetic 'switch' which allows clover to concentrate condensed tannins in its leaves and stems; AgResearch hopes to be able to reduce methane from stock.

This has enormous commercial potential for AgResearch both here in New Zealand and in the international market. The recent Global Research Alliance meeting in Wellington (see http://www.3news.co.nz/Feeding-the-world/tabid/1341/articleID/150090/Default.aspx) is testament to that.

There are a range of other potential benefits from this work. AgResearch claims that it will mean less bloat in stock.

This is good from an animal welfare and economic point of view, since bloat can be both painful and fatal. In addition the animals will produce more meat and milk, presumably as a result of the reduced methane production.

Conventional clover makes stock more productive anyway, but farmers tend to keep clover cover limited since it can cause bloat. If genetically engineered clover does not cause bloat then farmers can have a higher proportional of pasture in clover.

This is likely to lead to less nitrogen fertiliser being used as well, since clover is leguminous and fixes (or rather hosts a bacteria which fixes) nitrogen in soils.

From an ethical point of view the fact that this is intragenic genetic engineering rather than trangenic may comfort some people. The insertion of human genes into sheep is highly offensive to many.

The manipulation of clover genes and reinsertion of clover genes into clover does not lead to the same level of abhorrence. The genetic engineering industry has been playing on this, with international apologists such as Caius Rommens arguing that intragenic genetic engineering should face less stringent risk assessment procedures than is usual.

New Zealand's own Tony Connor similarly argues that intragenic genetic engineering is not really genetic engineering at all and so is not, or should not be, covered by the legislation.

Since AgResearch says that this new clover is at least 10 15 years away from commercial release, expect to see them lobbying heavily around this issue over the next few years.

This approach only makes sense, however, if all concerns about genetic engineering are irrational by which term I do not mean spurious. If the concern is solely about inappropriate boundary crossing then intragenic genetic engineering must be acceptable. However the genetic engineering debate was never just about emotion versus science.

While I do not for one minute seek to belittle the emotional response of many people that genetic engineering 'just doesn't seem right', I also know that a number of scientists, geneticists even, have grave concerns about the way that genetic engineering is developing.

Those concerns are not blunted by whether the source material comes from the same species or another.

Professor Jack Heineman likens the process of genetic engineering to cutting a few sentences out of a magazine and inserting them randomly into a book. Most of the time the resulting pages makes no sense.

Occasionally they do, but we don't always know all of the resulting changes. Similarly the organisms created by genetic engineering are usually not viable, but occasionally they are.

It doesn't matter whether the inserted words are from the same book or a magazine; the context of the words has changes sufficiently to make the results uncertain. For that reason he rejects any notion that intragenic genetic engineering be treated any differently from transgenic.

New Zealand should be particularly careful about the commercial release of a pollinated pasture plant. Should this clover be released it is almost certain to spread across the country very rapidly and affect surrounding non-genetically engineered varieties and species.

In addition, as the Royal Commission on Genetic Engineering pointed out, we know very little about the effects of genetic engineered organisms on living soils.

AgResearch's solution to methane emissions run the risk, like the cats in the Dr Seuss story, of creating even bigger problems than what we started with. Just as importantly, though, it falls prey to the problem of reductionist thinking that is a significant cause of the ecological crisis we are in and I don't just mean climate change.

By attempting to fix methane emissions by genetically engineering pasture AgResearch is likely to exacerbate the many other environmental problems associated with dairy farming in this country.

The unwillingness to accept any limits to dairy expansion has become a national psychosis and has already led to a government sponsored coup against Environment Canterbury.

It is time to accept that the best all round solution to the problem of unsustainable dairy farming is to de-intensify, and even better, to go organic.

Gooder fish

2010-06-09T16:15:00.005+12:00

“What do you think about this?” he asked, waving a letter under my nose. I was in Poppa's Takeaways on behalf of the extended family and had just finished placing a complex order in two parts when Dave bounced over. I squizzed at it, surprised. Forest and Bird must have written to every takeway in the country for one to have come to Waingaro Road, Ngaruawahia. It was their latest 'best fish guide' with an explanation of how the shop could improve their fish buying choices.

I go to Poppa's because it ranks among the best fish and chip shops in the country, IMHO, so I was happy to see that Dave didn't take the easy route and throw it in the bin. We talked about why some of his best selling fish rank so badly on the sustainability stakes. I knew that a lot of hoki is still caught by bottom trawling (see my column 'fishing stories') and that there are questions about the quota levels. It seems that there are similar concerns around snapper and other popular fish. We talked about what he could do as a fish seller and he decided that he would put a large photocopy of the guide on his shop wall and encourage customers to move towards more sustainable choices, such as kingfish instead of snapper, or gurnard and tarakihi rather than lemonfish. It would be hard to wean the locals off their favourite fry, but he thought he should at least give it a go.

Now I'm not one of those people who think that green consumerism can save the planet. As a general strategy it is doomed to failure, as John Barrett of the Stockholm Environment Institute demonstrates in relation to greenhouse gas emissions. The reason partly comes down to the Jevons Paradox which says that increasing efficiency leads to increased net resource use. For example, more efficient car engines make it cheaper to drive, so people drive more. Conscious consumerism may be preferable to unconscious consumerism but will be inadequate unless it challenges the dynamics of the growth economy. As a tactic, however, green consumerism can be a powerful lever by opening up markets for sustainable products and by shrinking down markets for unsustainable ones. Put simply, if you're going to buy fish then the 'good fish guide' is a useful thing to have in your wallet or purse.

Or even better, to see on the wall of the local chip shop. No one expects shop keepers to put themselves out of business but we should expect them to provide their customers with this kind of information. Of course many takeaways only stock one kind of fish, in which case customers should be asking them to make sure it is one of the more sustainably harvested kinds, as Burger Wisconsin is doing. Its the kind of action that is easy, non threatening and potentially catalytic. There's no need to be rude or aggressive. When you next go to a place that sells cooked fish, ask if they received a guide from Forest and Bird and how they intend to respond to it. This week is a good week to do that, since yesterday was World Oceans Day.

The world's oceans need a bit of a birthday treat right now, what with BP spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico and anti whaling activists in the Japanese courts. New Zealanders have been understandably preoccupied with Peter Bethune, who faces a potential 15 years in jail for attempting a citizens arrest on board a Japanese whaling boat and has just been cut off by Sea Shepherd in a very strangely timed decision. We have been less conscious of the Japanese Greenpeace activists who also face jail terms for exposing corruption in Japanese whaling. May Tangaroa protect them all.

(from 3news.co.nz/environmentsci/monkeywrenching)

The Crafar farms and our strategic advantage

2010-06-07T22:59:00.002+12:00

Most dairy farmers must hate the Crafars. I know that, like the Police, they've got that 'closed ranks' thing going on, but in private they must be cursing that family. They've probably done more to destroy the carefully constructed image of the New Zealand dairy farmer than all the tree-huggers put together. The Crafars were, after all, the epitomy of farming success. Once New Zealand's largest privately owned dairy operation, they have been reduced to fighting eviction from their farm (a court date has just been set) while their assets are liquidated. Their holdings were so enormous that who will buy them is causing handwringing in the highest places.

Now I don't actually hug trees but I do like them a lot, so I was surprised to find myself agreeing with a range of people opposed to a sale to Hong Kong listed (and Cayman's registered) Natural Dairy (NZ) Holdings. These include Federated Farmers' Lachlan McKenzie, Fonterra's Henry van der Heyden (although the position does seem hypocritical from an industry that is buying up land in South America and opening farms in China as fast as it can) and ex-ACT MP Deborah Coddington, .

To me it just seems stupid to sell-off large swathes of productive land to overseas interests,whether they are Chinese, American or Australian. Unlike Treasury secretary John Whitehead I don't see overseas investment as fundamentally beneficial for New Zealand. I see a dimunition of sovereignty, expatriation of profits to other countries and the maintenance of artificially high land prices. The servicing of the resulting gargantuan farm debts is driving the intensification of dairy farming, with associated over-extraction of water and increased run-off pollution. It is also what is driving the corporatisation of farming, with young farmers increasingly incapable of buying their own farm.

No one seems quite sure what Natural Dairy (NZ)'s game is. Fiona Rotherham in The Independent has questioned the murky financial backing and the 'patchy' business backgrounds of the two front people, Jack Chen and May Wang. She puts this in the context of a Hong Kong propensity for 'pump and dump' stock manipulation schemes, where people talk up a company through grand public announcements and then exit the stock when the price soars. No one is saying that this is what Natural Dairy (NZ) is doing, just that there are some questions that need answering.

Other opponents see a different motive. Henry van der Heyden and Greens co-leader Russel Norman have mentioned food security and there is no doubt that is something that the Chinese Government takes very seriously. According to China’s Ministry of Land and Resources China lost 8 million hectares or 6.6 percent of its arable land in the last decade through soil erosion and salinization. Which is why in 2008 China was drafting a policy to encourage agricultural companies to purchase farmland abroad. Much of this has been in Africa, where the practise of 'land grabbing' is seen as a form of neo-colonialism,since the intent is not to assist local economies to develop but simply to secure resources.

Whether a 'pump and dump' or a 'land grab', New Zealand needs to look very carefully at this proposed sale. Which is why I was pleased to read that Landcorp is considering entering a bid. Given the poor environmental practises of the Crafar's, however, it would be good to see something more regenerative on that land than intensive dairying. Landcorp did some research a few years ago that indicated that organic dairy farming has similar profitability to conventional, although they didn't look at organic sheep and beef, which is where the biggest premiums are. Even without increased profit, the case for conversion is compelling given the environmental gains from organic farming. After the Crafars, it would be poetic to see Landcorp turn the properties into organic R&D dairy farms, and it would be of much greater strategic advantage to New Zealand.

(from my Waikato Times column 4 June 2010)

Pirates in Club Med

2010-06-01T17:54:00.003+12:00

Once again the Israeli Government and the Israeli Defence Force have shown their utter contempt for (non-Israeli) human life and for international law by boarding an aid ship in international waters and killing between ten and twenty of its passengers. The bitter reality, though, is that condemnation from the non-Islamic world will be token and short lived. If Israel can get away with invading Lebanon, killing at least 1,500 people, mostly civilians, and bombing identified UN peacekeepers what do a few hippies on a boat matter?

Well, not quite hippies. The ship was part of a flotilla ferrying about 700 people, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire, a number of European legislators and an elderly Holocaust survivor. It was organised by a broad coalition of groups and although many of the ships were Turkish registered, the activists came mostly from around Europe. The number of casualties is still, at the time of writing, unclear although some reports indicate that most are Turks.

Turkey's relationship with Israel, strategically and historically important, has been under strain for some time. This latest event may be a killer blow. Turkey's Foreign Ministry has said this “breach of international law may lead to irreparable consequences in our bilateral relations” and an unnamed source has indicated that Turkey is looking at its rights under international law.

Amos Harel suggests in Haaretz that the more significant fall-out will be with Palestinians, those with Israeli citizenship and those denied it. If it is confirmed that Raed Salah, the head of the Islamic Movement's northern branch is one of the dead he predicts riots and the real possibility of a third intifada.

The response from Europe has, in contrast, been predicably inconsequential. The EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton has called for a "full inquiry". Greece summoned Israel's ambassador to demand a report on the safety of any of its citizens on board and has cancelled a join military exercise with Israel. German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said he was “deeply concerned”. The French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner was the most outspoken. “I am deeply shocked.... we do not understand the still provisional human toll of such an operation against a humanitarian initiative that has been known for several days" he said.

But ultimately such words mean nothing. The Israeli Government acts with belligerent distain for the niceties of diplomatic signalling. It knows that it acts as an agent for Western interests in the Middle East. Under such conditions the world can say what it likes but Israel will continue to act with impunity. Who else could get away with slapping the President of the USA in the face TWICE with the same trick and still be told that the US had "no better friend than Israel"? If I didn't know better I'd think that Netanyahu was having a laugh at Obama's expense.

As far as the dead humanitarians go, Israel claims that its soldiers were shot at when they boarded the boat. That is not what the video indicates or what journalists on board the Mavi Marmara report. Even if it were true, people have a right to protect themselves against piracy in international waters.

Israel says that the flotilla was a stunt. Well, of course it was. It is meant to draw attention to the terrible nature and effects of the blockade of Gaza, which Israel and Egypt imposed when the people of Gaza exercised their democratic rights to elect a Hamas government. If the blockade was meant to dislodge Hamas, however, it has been a complete failure. What it has done instead, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, is destroy the economy of Gaza and prevent reconstruction of the badly damaged area.

The Israeli government says it allows 15,000 tonnes of aid a week into Gaza but this is a fraction of what is needed according to the UN, which describes the situation in Gaza as “increasingly desperate”. In addition Israel places heavy restriction on reconstruction materials such cement and building materials. South African judge Richard Goldstone, on a UN fact-finding mission has suggested that the blockade of Gaza be considered a crime against humanity.

It would be nice to think that the deaths of the flotilla activists are not in vain and that this terrible incident acts as a catalyst to break the blockade of Gaza and allow the Palestinian people to breathe a bit more freely. Somehow, however, I doubt it. Geopolitics will prove once again to be more important to Western Governments than the lives of Arabs – or indeed of their own people.

2010-06-01T17:54:00.001+12:00

Clamping down on cannabis culture

2010-05-18T17:56:00.002+12:00

I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, at least when it comes to the New Zealand Government. I know it's hard to avoid the conclusion that there is more than meets the eye to 9/11, and yes there is pretty good evidence that the CIA has been complicit in the trafficking of hard drugs at least since the Vietnam war, but this isn't America. In New Zealand, bungling is often a more likely explanation than corruption.

That's why I have to reject the suggestion that the current crackdown on the cannabis culture is designed to boost organised crime. That may be the result, but I just don't believe it is the intent. Drug policy is highly complex, very political and driven by a great deal of smug self righteousness. A better candidate for frenzied counterproductive activity would be hard to find, hence these latest moves. Someone in Government clearly thinks that we have gone too far. Cannabis use has become common-place. It is widely accepted even by those who do not partake. The police often turn a blind eye, and that staid body the Law Commission, in its own tentative way, has suggested easing criminal penalties for pot. Clearly it is time we were stamped on.

After the shambles of Operation Lime (Operation Lemon?) which busted the Switched On Gardener chain of grow shops, the authorities moved quickly to try to close down the NORML News last week. This has been the mouthpiece of the cannabis law reform movement for twenty years and is likely to be an important rallying point. The magazine is also an astonishing source of scientific information on the latest research findings around cannabis – the stuff that never gets reported in mainstream media. It is an excellent source of legal and political information, and offers a range of harm minimisation techniques for cannabis users. It also provides tips for the home grower, which was the excuse used to send it to the censors. Growing advice is not the primary purpose of the magazine. What is the primary purpose (and growing advice is a part of that) is to inform people about their rights and responsibilities as citizens, to get them active in changing the law and to encourage them to take responsibility for themselves. The Government should be sponsoring it, not attempting to destroy it.

Even if it was a grow magazine, taking it out of circulation would be a huge mistake, unless the objective was to increase gang drug profits and give a boost to the P distribution networks. There is no way that the Government can police the cannabis market out of existence, except perhaps with the most draconian excesses, and even this has not worked in the USA. The problem with policing is that any genuinely successful operation drives down supply, which drives up the price, which creates more incentive for people to get into the business. One way to seriously dent the illegal market, although not destroy it, is for more cannabis users to grow their own. A more effective way is to tax and license its sale. Either way means less money goes to the gangs and fewer cannabis users come into contact with P through the tinny houses. It’s a win / win. Of course it means accepting that responsible adults, for very good reasons, will continue to have a quiet toot when they feel like it, just as they have always done.

The raids on Switched On Gardener have had the opposite effect. I'm sure that the police officers behind the two year stake out thought they were on to something big, at least at the beginning, but by the time they realised that they were wasting their time and our money it was too late. They had to make arrests in order to justify the sunk costs and they have been inflating their results ever since. Deputy Police Commissioner Rob Pope says that the arrests will "break the cornerstone of the illicit cannabis cultivation industry". I just hope for the police's sake that he actually knows that he is talking rubbish. Serious commercial cannabis operators don't buy their gear from Switched On Gardener. Think about it. If you were a large scale commercial grower would you buy your lights there? Any cannabis growers that do buy from there are most likely to be small time personal growers, people who just want to grow for themselves and a few friends so they don't have to buy it from gangs.

Any attempt to clamp down on the cannabis culture is a wasted effort that is doomed to fail. It's part of being Kiwi now. A better idea would be to follow the examples of Holland and Portugal during the Euro 2000 and 2004 football championships. The official tolerance of cannabis use noticeably reduced incidents of violence around the games. Police spokesman Johann Beelan said that cannabis “was part of the conditions which meant everyone had a good time". NORML NZ President Phil Saxby has suggested something similar for the Rugby World Cup next year. Thoughtful, stoned punters instead of loud, drunk and aggressive? What a delightful idea.

(from Monkeywrenching)

Reading Colenso

2010-05-13T09:07:00.001+12:00

I decided this week that it was time to read William Colenso's eyewitness account of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. The Waitangi Tribunal is currently hearing Nga Puhi's version of those events so it seemed fitting. It's actually quite a lively read and gives a reasonable idea of what Governor Hobson and the missionaries said to the gathered Nga Puhi chiefs, as well as some inkling of their debates about what they thought it might mean.

Ever since that day in 1840 the Crown has contended that Maori signed away their sovereignty. I have always struggled to understand how they come to this conclusion. Colenso recounts that the rangatira had the Maori language text read to them and that a number of them signed it the following day. None of them were told the content of the English version and none of them signed it, nor did Hobson. So even though the English version cedes sovereignty, it is difficult to see what that has to do with anything.

The Maori version affirms Maori rangatiratanga (chieftainship) over their own people and possessions but yields kawanatanga to the Crown. What is kawanatanga? It was a new word for Maori, adapted from the Bible, and its meaning is ambiguous. Reading Colenso helps identify what people might have thought it meant.

Before reading out the text of the proposed treaty, the Reverend H. Williams gave a speech on behalf of Hobson. He said that Queen Victoria had sent Hobson out of a desire to do good for the Maori people and for her subjects living in New Zealand. The Queen had no power to restrain British people outside of her own dominions and so asked the chiefs to sign the treaty “and so give her that power which shall enable her to restrain them”. Remember that most Pakeha in New Zealand at that time were pretty savage compared to Maori. He went on to say that the Governor had not come to take their lands but to secure them in their ownership of it, and to ensure the return of lands unfairly taken from them.

The speeches that followed demonstrate that many of the rangatira were suspicious that the real aim of the Governor was indeed to usurp their lands and power. What is clear, though, is that none of them were agreeing to this. There was no consent for the Crown to rule over Maori, but rather for it to restrain the excesses of the Pakeha. The ongoing and unceasing assertion by Maori of their own political sovereignty, such as by Nga Puhi before the tribunal this week, is justified on that basis alone.

Ngai Tuhoe, of course, did not sign the Treaty at all. However they had terrible atrocities afflicted upon them by the Crown and it is their lands that were used to establish the Urewera National Park in 1957. John Key has said this week, in an extraordinary breach of good faith, that the Urewera will not be returned to Tuhoe. Once again this demonstrates why allowing the thief to adjudicate their own case is so problematic.

Apart from sheer racism, it is difficult to see why Tuhoe should not be returned their own lands. The Crown has always said that stolen lands now in private ownership will not be taken for restitution and this is a position that Maori have generally accepted on the basis that although it disadvantages them (since most stolen was settled and farmed) it would create a new injustice to seize it from its current occupants. What the Prime Minister is now saying is that even land owned by the Crown will not be returned unless in dribs and drabs. It would seem to be the sheer size of the Urewera forests that is the sticking point – that is to say it is simply the fact that the Crown is in a position to return the bulk of the land taken that is the very reason it will not. Talk about wanting to steal your cake and eat it too.

My thoughts on Saturday's anti mining march

2010-05-05T21:34:00.004+12:00

I had a great time on Saturday, for someone who doesn't much like going on marches. Marches are a bit like petitions in my opinion – a huge amount of effort for something that usually gets ignored. Very often, marches do little more than demonstrate how marginal the issue is to the vast majority of people, and how bereft of ideas the campaigners are. Saturday was an entirely different matter.

First of all, it was HUGE. I started the day somewhere nearish the front, bemoaning what seemed like a poor turnout. Then I realised that the sidestreet was also full of people, that the front was quite a long way ahead of where I thought it was, and that people were continuing to pack in at the back. I spent the march drifting slowly down the line, catching up with old friends, meeting new ones and getting a sense of the size. By the time I got to Myers Park I was in the back row, discussing with John Whyte and Mike Finlayson whether this was the biggest march we have ever seen in Auckland, or one of the biggest. When you get to these sorts of numbers it’s a distinction that is of academic interest only.

Also important was that there was a broad cross section of people, although Maori were not fully represented. The biggest tino rangatiratanga flag in the world was there, but almost no Maori on the mic despite (I understand) being asked. After their shameful vote on the Emission Trading Scheme, I can't help speculating whether the Maori Party is leaving the door open to support the mining proposals. I hope not. Even so, no one who actually looked could argue that this was a crowd of anything other than a wide range of New Zealanders of all ages and walks of life gathering to say a resounding “NO” to the Government's plans to open schedule 4 conservation lands to mining.

Thirdly, it was creative, at least in parts. There is no doubt that the activist movement has been bunkered down for a number of years and this showed. The crazy theatrical displays of other times and places were not much in evidence and I saw no stilt-walkers, dalek beehives or bicycle power soundsystems running off the back of 6 person velomobiles. There was a blow up earth bouncing around, and – joy of joys – some satirical street theatre in the form of CRAP.

CRAP stands for 'Capitalism Represents Acceptable Policy' and CRAP stunts generally consist of people dressing up in suits and representing those corporate interests that are usually invisible at these events. The interesting thing is that attempts to articulate the most extreme and over-the-top satirical propositions actually sound very similar to the lines coming out of mainstream economic and corporate mouthpieces. It indicates just how wide the chasm between us actually is. However putting ourselves in the shoes of our opponents is always a powerful learning experience, and one that the green movement often shies away from. The issues that we campaign on are important and urgent, but this must not prevent us from both reflecting on how we communicate with other people and from thinking about what we can learn from our opponents. Sadly quite a few marchers failed to see both the joke and the point behind it.

Anyway, it was a great march. Lots of fun, empowering and inspiring. A huge thank you to all of the people involved in organising it, and all those who came from far and wide to attend. I went home with a renewed enthusiasm for the campaign. This was not dampened by the predictable response of the Government. Gerry Brownlee had to laugh it off in public and dismiss its importance, despite the consternation it must have caused behind closed doors. The fact is, no march has ever changed a Government's mind as far as I can see, but it will have them privately worried. It is the first serious public demonstration against John Key's Government. And it is at the beginning of the campaign, not its culmination.

What was important about the march, then, was not how it affected the Government, but how it affected those of us who participated. It was a catalyst for all the simmering discontent around this Government to become manifest. It delegitimised the Government's plans and legitimises the opposition. People can argue about how big the majority opposing the mining plans actually is, but regardless of that, like the Springbok tour of 1981, this issue is set to bitterly divide the nation if the Government goes forward with it. Polls do not tell the full story – the powerful passions that this issue arouses in the hearts of ordinary New Zealanders. The covenant that was made between Government, business and citizens in the past that drew the line around the conservation estate is being broken. This march was the first sign of a gathering storm, and one that will not be bought off with token gestures. John Key's Government will rue the day if it decides to ignore the message of Saturday.

(from my TV3 column, Monkeywrenching)

ANZAC Day

2010-04-26T19:17:00.002+12:00

I'm not sure what to make of ANZAC day commemorations. I have been to a number over the years, as a way of paying my posthumous respects to old guys I have met in New Zealand who fought and suffered in WWII. I also go to pay respects to my own family members who died, fighting on the other side, and to pay respects to all those women and men who have suffered in war and reflect on the terrible things they have seen and done and had done to them. I pray I never have to experience such things.

I guess my ambivalence about the public ceremonies is because I am not sure what the message of ANZAC day is. I like the idea that we are all getting together to say “never again”, but I am not sure that is true. I would be happy with “only in the direst of need” but I'm not even sure I can rely on that. Many of the VIPS at these events look like they would be only too happy to send soldiers off to kill if it would enhance their vote

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the New Zealand Army. I think our armed forces are pretty good, as far as armies go. I've been told that New Zealand has a reputation for being able to get the job done with the minimum of fuss and without the need for excessive amounts of expensive gear. I've been told we have a reputation for developing good community relations, and that our soldiers are noted for being as quick to whip out a guitar as a gun (maybe the New Zealand Police could learn something here). Having a high proportion of Maori is probably helpful in Pacific peace keeping operations, where most of our army's work is done. My problem is with the ambiguous symbolism of ANZAC Day.

I heard someone from the RSA commenting on National Radio that one of the reasons for the increasing attendance at ANZAC Day events is the coverage it gets from Maori TV. MTS has led the way in giving in-depth and extensive coverage to events of national importance such as ANZAC Day and Waitangi Day. I guess it's no surprise that Maori have a particular regard for ANZAC Day – the 28th (Maori) Battalion was internationally reknowned for its fierce bravery and the number of its soldiers who were decorated. Fighting in war, said Apirana Ngata, was the price of citizenship. As if the loss of lands and political independence was not price enough.

Even so, many young Maori came home from war, sometimes physically maimed, often psychologically scarred, to find their lands under the ownership of Pakeha farmers and their people still being treated as second class citizens. Perhaps that broken promise is one reason why it is so important for many Maori communities to remember and reaffirm that sacrifice, and why the mean-spirited racism that remains so wide spread in New Zealand society rankles so.

ANZAC Day is important for us all though, not just for Maori. In particular it is a day to reflect on the sacrifices of those who go to war on our behalf, and those they kill and maim in our name. This seems particularly important today, when New Zealand has soldiers serving in two imperial wars – in Iraq and in Afghanistan. It is vitally important that we continue to ask why they are there. We owe it to the soldiers who serve there, and to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan who may be dying as you read this.

In particular we cannot allow the claim of security to prevent us from continuing to ask what our troops are up to. The Prime Minister, and the Army, are happy to trot out Willie Apiata as propaganda but they continue to stonewall on the real questions about what our troops are up to over there. We know that US troops have been involved in numerous cases of atrocities in Iraq, from prison torture to the murder of civilians. We know of these because the stories have been leaked. I am not saying that New Zealand troops have ever been involved in such atrocities, but simply that we would probably never know if they had.

Western armies learned a huge lesson from the invasion of Vietnam: that controlling the media needs to be made a high priority in any military operation. That the lesson has been learned is readily apparent in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the media has been bought off with the trinkets that come from collaboration. Here in Aotearoa , for example, the media seems largely content as long as it is fed with nice photos every once in a while. It has become a domesticated dog.

Apart from the most obvious one, however, the lesson that has NOT been learned from Vietnam is the self-defeating nature of working with drug-funded war lords. Professor Peter Dale Scott has written an excellent analysis of CIA involvement with the Afghani opium trade – a trade almost destroyed by the Taliban but enjoying a massive resurgence under the Northern Alliance (Hat tip Rob Ueberfeldt). As in Vietnam and South America, the CIA has not been actively involved in the drug trade so much as protecting the shipments of key allies in order to secure their cooperation. It is a dangerous game and fuels further instability in the region.

In the end, I think ANZAC Day is important for us as a nation. I hope it is a way to avoid the kind of militaristic jingoism that seems so apparent in the USA. Whether people chose to attend or not attend the public ceremonies, let us make it a day for us all to remember those who fought, to reflect on the terrible things that people do to each other in war and to reaffirm our commitment as a nation to working to decrease its likelihood.

Legal bestiality

2010-04-19T18:09:00.001+12:00

I don't usually comment on people's sexual activities. I don't really care what people do for their jollies, as long as they are all consenting adults. There are, in my opinion, more pressing matters to concern ourselves with. Bestiality, on the other hand, is almost by definition non-consensual. When I read that a young man had appeared in the Christchurch Youth Court accused of having sex with a donkey I was sure, if he was actually fornicating with it, that the donkey didn't give informed consent.

Still, as distasteful as I find the idea, I could not help reflecting on the imbalance in our legal system that prosecuted a young man for rogering a donkey on the Friday, and then gave legal sanction to the insertion of human DNA into goats, sheep and cows the following week. It seems that bestiality is illegal if you do it for fun, but not if you do it for profit. At least the donkey in Summervale Reserve was not being impregnated.

The decision by the Environmental Risk Management Authority (ERMA) to approve AgResearch's application was predictable. Since the massive uproar over genetic engineering (GE) around the beginning of the century there has been a relentless grinding away at public concern by Government, Crown research institutions and the biotech companies. It began with the Royal Commission on Genetic Engineering, which received over 10,000 submissions, mostly from ordinary New Zealanders, 92 percent of which were opposed to the use of GE. Nevertheless, the Commission chose to side with the commercial interests and recommend that we “proceed with caution”.

“Proceed with caution” is doublespeak for 'start slow to lull people into a false sense of security'. Governments use a similar tactic when they give offensive legislation a delayed start date, or use a staged roll-out. It relies on frog psychology. I've never actually put a frog into boiling water to check if it's true, but the urban myth says that a frog placed in boiling water will try to jump out, but put one into cold water and heat it until it's boiling and it will sit there until it becomes soup.

The Labour government followed the recommendation of the Royal Commission to give risk assessment of GE applications to ERMA. Bureaucratic quasi-legal bodies like ERMA have an unerring drive towards easy compromises – its the most risk-free stance to take. When confronted with an application in a highly polarised area like GE, they will always go for adding a few token conditions to placate the community while permitting the development to proceed. The RMA consent process tends to work in a very similar way. It is a good process for dealing with technical issues, but is incapable of dealing with matters of principle or ethics. The fact is most people just don't think scientists should be doing transgenic genetic engineering.

So when AgResearch put in an application that, in the words of Dr Judy Carman, of the Institute of Health and Environmental Research in her submsission to ERMA, was “asking for Carte Blanche to join almost every known DNA sequence known to man (and some that are not yet known) in almost any combination and to insert them into animals to produce any number of inadequately specified proteins” ERMA did not do the obvious thing and reject it outright. It is impossible to assess the risk of such a vague application. Instead ERMA took the only path it knows and approved the application with a few added conditions.

Although they claim that these conditions are stringent, this is somewhat of an exaggeration. They say they have limited the range of modifications and types of organisms, but the list of expressions, organisms and cell lines runs to 732 pages. None of their conditions inhibit what AgResearch is doing, but they do specify where the research must take place and what kinds of things that should have been in the application in the first place. ERMA also, bizarrely, seeks to placate tangata whenua by specifying that any human genes should not be from Maori or Polynesia people while failing to acknowledge the equally strong ethical, cultural and spiritual objections of Pakeha against crossing human and animal whakapapa.

Any resulting organisms can not be used for commercial purposes, but this is little comfort. When it comes to this kind of 'biopharming' research, many of the medical promises are purely speculative at this stage, although good propaganda. But it is all about softening us up. Pharmaceutical cows milk may not yet ready for the shop shelves, but it looks like PGG Wrightson and also Fonterra with AgResearch are getting ready to commercially launch genetically engineered pasture grasses. Otago University genetics researcher Jack Heinemann has consistently warned about the lack of good risk assessment with genetic engineering because, partly due to intellectual property rights issues, it is largely the profiteering company that does the safety checking. This has obvious disadvantages. It is of particular concern with pasture grasses because of their wide pollen dispersion and the potential for gene transfer to other species.

New Zealand farmers have up until now showed a high level of suspicion of GE and the promises made on its behalf. New Zealand citizens have also shown very clearly that we would be a GE free country if it was up to the people to decide. Since the official channels are so unresponsive to democracy, I have to wonder how long before someone tries to shoot those cows?

Hungarian green political success

2010-04-14T13:01:00.002+12:00

Is a different kind of politics possible? One where cynicism is not the norm? One where the interests of ordinary people and of the environment have greater weight than those of big money? One where long term thinking is more persuasive than short term populism? A growing number of people around the world seem to think so.

In Hungary the LMP has just become the first green political party to achieve parliamentary representation by making it over the 5 percent threshold. LMP stands for Lehet Mas Politika meaning 'another kind of politics is possible'. It is a significant success. Since the end of the Soviet bloc Hungarian politics has swung from 'right' to 'left' and back in a destabilising pendulum motion (nb this is different to New Zealand, where we tend to amble from 'mildly right' to 'more right' and back). While the election in Hungary has just been resoundingly won by Fidesz, a right wing party led by the controversial Viktor Orban, the election of LMP members has the potential to be a catalyst for a deeper political/cultural shift in Hungary and beyond.

In Western Europe Green Parties have been very successful, including participating in a number of coalition governments, but this has been less true in Central and Eastern Europe. This is surprising, given the terrible ecological and social legacies of Marxist-Leninist communism. Marx, like mainstream capitalist thinkers, saw the environment as essentially without value until transformed by human activity. The drive for industrialisation in what was then a technologically backward Russia and in its occupied zones meant that the environment was brutally sacrificed for the revolution. Environmental standards were often even more lax than under capitalism.

The end of communism has brought its own problems. Some of the more foresighted communist chiefs reinvented themselves as capitalists and proceeded to buy up at a bargain price the national resources that were being privatised under the advice of people like our own Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson. Those people now exert considerable influence in a number of post-communist countries, which itself fosters a sense of cynicism and despair among ordinary people. The desperate economic circumstances that a number of them face are also helping to foster a growing neo-fascist movement in some places.

So it is surprising that in ex-Iron Curtain states, until now Greens have only achieved parliamentary representation in the Czech Republic, Latvian and Estonian. Green politics tends to be a politics of hope and action, an antidote to fatalism. The slogan of the Australian Greens of a few years ago expresses it nicely: Clean Air, Clean Water, Clean Politics. I would have thought it an attractive message under the circumstances.

Some people say that green politics is the politics of the wealthy and that poor people have no time for protecting the environment. However this does not explain the growing movement around the 'environmentalism of the poor', in which the 'global south' is becoming the site of many of the most crucial environmental battles. Poor people and especially indigenous communities are struggling to defend their local communities and local ecologies in the face of highly profitable 'development' because they understand that it is the poor who usually bear the brunt of ecological degradation, poor decision-making and political corruption.

The election of LMP suggests that things may be changing. However, just as it has been difficult for the NZ Greens to put a brake on the unsustainable follies of both Labour and National governments, with only a few MP's it will be difficult in the short term for LMP to have a big impact on the Hungarian Government. Their job is bigger than that though. Their real task is to build a better understanding of green thinking - what a sustainable economy would look like and how people's lives would be improved by it. They have to build a green constituency.

In the context of Central Europe, this also means helping to build a regional green movement. The cyanide spill into the Tisza River in 2000 by a Romanian / Australian mining consortium demonstrated that environmental problems respect no national boundaries. Central Europeans have a history of fighting for each other during their uprisings and revolutions. Now they have to work together on an equally important task, to demonstrate that regardless of national differences and circumstances, another kind of politics is possible.

Feeding the world

2010-04-08T14:47:00.002+12:00

I'm constantly amazed at people's ability to spend vast amounts of money to arrive at increasingly more complicated ways of doing pointless things. Genetic engineering springs immediately to mind, but what got me thinking about it recently is the Global Research Alliance, which met for the first time yesterday.

The Global Research Alliance is a New Zealand Government-led initiative that aims to reduce farm emissions while ensuring food production meets the demands of a growing world population, according to Associate Climate Change Minister Tim Groser. It was proposed by John Key last September at the United Nations General Assembly and is backed by a number of countries, including the USA. Officials and scientists from 28 countries are getting together in Wellington to start nutting out questions like who will lead the different workstreams and who will own any intellectual property rights that come out of it.

All very interesting, but it begs the rather large question of when are we going to do something about the need to REDUCE the demands of a growing world population? Humans are stretching natural ecosystems to breaking point as a result of both our growing population and our per capita consumption, at least in rich countries like ours. It's time to tackle the problem instead of just wondering how we can make money from it.

The global demand for meat and dairy products is growing rapidly, not primarily from population growth but as a result of the emergence of large middle classes in places like China and India. The aggressive promotion of dairy products in East Asia by Fonterra (anyone remember their chocolate cheese?) is an attempt to get into their wallets, and is good business practise. However, when you consider that the livestock sector is the single biggest anthropogenic user of land on Earth, contributing 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions worldwide (more than transportation) and is probably the biggest cause of deforestation on the planet, it seems obvious that promoting more meat and dairy consumption is not in our long term collective interests as a species. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation report 'Livestock's Long Shadow' outlines the problems well.

A couple of years ago the world faced a serious food crisis. The media largely blamed it on the use of croplands to grow biofuels and it is true that this was a contributing factor. What made it worse was the fact that some biofuels used more energy to produce than they yielded. In reality, though, biofuels were only part of the story. The widespread feeding of food crops to livestock is a far more significant factor, with a protein conversion efficiency of between about five and twenty percent, depending on the animal. In 2002 around 670 million tonnes of cereal were fed to animals, including more than 60 percent of the maize and barley grown in the world and more than 90 percent of the soymeal.

One of the saving graces of New Zealand pastoral farming is that our animals actually eat pasture, although high stocking rates is leading to a growing reliance on imported feedstocks such as palm kernel. New Zealand is the major importer of palm kernel and while Fonterra argues that this is a byproduct, not a food crop, tropical deforestation to grow palm oil plantations is made more attractive by this additional market for the kernel. In addition, even with pasture fed animals, in most cases the amount of protein per hectare is much smaller than if the same land was used to grow plant foods.

So if we were really interested in how to feed the world while reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we would simply sack the scientists and officials and use the research money to promote veganism. We'd probably all be healthier and there would be more food to go around. Such an elegant solution, however, is unlikely to find much favour at this week’s discussions.

The other side of the problem is the growing population. The real challenge is not how we are going to feed (and clothe, house and provision) the projected 8.9 billion people by 2050 , but how we are going to reduce that figure. The answers to that are not at all simple, but a fairer distribution of resources and access to education and birth control, especially for women, seem to be key factors. Perhaps Mr Key should get Durex to underwrite his next talk fest.

(from Monkeywrenching @ 3news.co.nz)

Sustainable mining? LMAO!

2010-03-29T16:09:00.003+13:00

I can't help wondering whether the Government and the mining industry are using the same PR company, after hearing their chorus about the need to 'balance the ledger'. To be fair, perhaps Gerry Brownlee is just borrowing the industry's lines, as he did its inflated accounts of how much money is to be made digging up our national parks.

It wouldn't be surprising though. National has now admitted that it “may” have told the mining industry that it was interested in opening up mining in NZ a good two years before the 2008 election, and almost four years before it told the rest of us. Having read in Nicky Hager's well documented book 'The Hollow Men' about the cynical manipulation of the public by the National Party (including 'faulty memory' about its collusion with the Exclusive Brethren) in the run up to the 2005 election, you'd have to forgive me for seeing a pattern here. In particular because while Don Brash fell on his sword, other characters implicated in the book, including John Key and Steven Joyce, remain in place.

For all his relaxed approach to the facts, though, I haven't yet heard Mr Brownlee try to repeat the assertion made by Doug Gordon, the head of the Mining Industries Association, that mining is a sustainable industry. I had to laugh really. Mining is the epitome of unsustainable. Regardless of how sensitively you do it, mining consists of digging up non-renewable resources. It doesn't take a PhD in maths to realise that this means it has a limited future.

That is not to say that mining could not be part of a sustainability plan, if we ever elected a Government with the wit to develop one. Unfortunately both National and Labour's grasp of the concept of sustainability seem to be as shallow as Mr Gordon's. They all seem to think that sustainability is no more than a marketing brand.

There are two main approaches to sustainability – what are called 'weak' and 'strong' sustainability. A weak sustainability approach recognises the existence of different kinds of capital – manufactured, social, natural etc - and says that to be sustainable the totality of capital needs to be preserved. Under this perspective logging old growth forests will sustainable if we invest the scarcity rent into other forms of capital development, such as knowledge. Rod Oram makes an interesting case for a variation of this approach in relation to the current mining debate.

An ecological approach says that you cannot substitute natural capital with other kinds of capital. The total sum of natural capital must be maintained seperately. In addition some specific ecosystems are so important that they must be preserved. Herman Daly operationalised this by saying that to be sustainable we need to ensure that:

1/ We do not harvest renewable resources at a faster rate than they can regenerate
2/ We do not pollute beyond the capacity of the receiving ecosystem to assimilate the pollution
3/ We do not use non-renewable resources faster than we develop renewable alternatives

Self evident, I would have thought. Yet the thinking that is driving the government, including in the current debate around mining, fails to address these issues at all. It seems to come down to a desperate search for money to flush through the system. Yes, we do need to balance our national accounts, but to dig up our mineral wealth and use it to fund our current profligate lifestyles is both stupid and immoral. It is akin to inheriting a beautiful house and dismantling parts of it to flog off the timber to pay for dining out and fast cars.

When it comes to the need to balance the ledger, the most critical account to balance is the environmental one. We are living way beyond our means. The discussion around mining might not be so depressing if it was part of a plan to generate capital to move this country towards sustainability. It could have been part of a comprehensive rethink that included the recent tax review, the massive infrastructural investments in transport, the RMA changes, local government changes... these now wasted opportunities might all have been elements of a strategic plan to prepare New Zealand for the carbon constrained, low energy future facing the world this century. Instead it looks like the government intends us to dig up some of the most beautiful places in the world, consume the proceeds and flush the end product down the loo.

(from my TV3 blog)

Activism and democracy

2010-03-22T16:43:00.001+13:00

When Pita Sharples questioned whether 'one person, one vote' is the most important democratic principle he was challenging one of the sacred cows of modern western society: that procedural 'fairness' produces the fairest results. It's no surprise that he was met with indignation.

For indigenous people who are a minority in their own land it is a relevant question to ask. How can they have any real power in a system that embodies, and is dominated by, the settler majority? It is no coincidence that in places like colonial New Zealand votes were originally reserved for land owning men. This disenfranchised Maori, who tended to own lands in common, and women. It was only after Maori had become a minority in their own country that private ownership of land was removed as a voting prerequisite and the 'democratic mandate' became a trump card.

What we have in this country, representative majoritarianism, is only one form of democracy and not necessarily the best. Every three years we elect a bunch of people to represent the interests of the Queen (when taking my seat in Parliament I tried to swear allegiance “to the people of New Zealand and Te Tiriti o Waitangi” but I was not permitted to do so). Governments claim a mandate for anything that was in their election manifestos, regardless that their voters don't necessarily support or even know about all their policies. They often claim a mandate for things they never mentioned before the election and getting a majority of votes in the House is their only constraint. They are, in effect, an elected dictatorship.

Which is one of the reasons I support an enforceable constitution that embodies Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the New Zealand Bill of Rights. In addition, I think it is time we started to talk in this country about a Bill of Environmental Rights. It is now clear that the Government, beholden as it is to big business interests, is incapable of dealing with the ecological crisis that we face.

The publication of the most recent results from the Clean Streams Accord show that dairy farmers' compliance with their effluent discharge consents is declining. Serious noncompliance is growing. That is without even talking about the massive unregulated effects on our rivers of increased cow urine on fields.

Fonterra has threatened, once again, to come down hard on non-complying farmers but the action has yet to match the rhetoric. They are putting in $1 million into a pilot monitoring campaign in the Waikato. This is small cheese compared to their $16 billion in revenue last year, or the $542 million of pretax profit they made. The Government has made disapproving noises about the Accord results but the Government has yet to do anything substantial to address the killing of our waterways. No surprises there.

As in the past New Zealanders may have to turn to direct action if they wish to protect ecological integrity. The Government's suggestion that it may open up conservation land to mining has brought that sharply home. Most New Zealanders, it would seem, do not support the environmental vandalism this is sure to entail, despite all the soothing words about 'surgical mining'. If the Government is foolish enough to push ahead with its plans, it may find opposition takes an extra-legal as well as legal form. It may prove to be a costly excersie for any company that decides to get involved.

Which makes the recent acquittal of the Waihopai Three all the more cheering. Their defence of 'claim of right' may not succeed for someone prosecuted for disabling a digger to protect a native forest, but the case proved something more important than that, IMO. It showed that 12 ordinary New Zealanders, unlike some media commentators, could decide a case based on more than the appearance of the defendants' beards. And that given all the facts 12 ordinary New Zealanders could decide that damaging Defence Department property was less of a crime than what that property is doing to the people in Iraq and elsewhere. For that I salute Adrian Leason, Peter Murnane, Sam Land and the jury that acquitted them.

(from my TV3 website blog 22 March 2010)

Brian Tamaki

2010-03-20T17:21:00.000+13:00

Why is everyone so down on Brian Tamaki? Ok, so he has EFT-POS machines in his churches. He tithes church members ten percent of their income and lives the high life on the backs of the poor. He demands unquestioning obedience. In the context of Christianity, none of that seems unusual. The role of shepherds, after all, is to deliver sheep to slaughter.

This is not to condone ecclesiastical greed, but I watched a live interview with him on Close Up recently and found it hard to understand why he was there. Mr Tamaki was as slick as ever, and quickly took control of the show. Richard Lewis looked as if he had been brought in to heavy the host if the questions got difficult, which unfortunately they never did. Mike Hoskins had the appearance and energy of Hugh Grant after a long night with Devine Brown.

He was on the show to discuss the walk-out of the pastor and most of the congregation in an Australian branch office of the church. It seemed a good excuse to question the self-appointed bishop about Destiny Church more broadly, but after watching it I decided that Mr Tamaki must have offered the interview to Close Up to avoid a more searching cross-examination elsewhere.

Still, we heard some interesting things. Destiny has EFT-POS in the church foyer because it is convenient for the congregation. Many churches do it. No one carries cash anymore. The congregation, he said, asked for the machines to be installed. I'm sure that is the truth, yet listening to the interview I couldn't help thinking about the money changers in the temple in Jerusalem. They were providing a needed service, changing the profane coins of the empire for the shekels that would be acceptable for offerings in the temple of the Lord. Money changers were a convenience for worshippers. None of that prevented Yesus from overturning their tables, driving them out with whips and cursing them for turning the Father's house into a den of thieves.

Tithing is an even more ancient practise than banking services in church. Paraphrasing the prophet Malachi, Mr Tamaki even accused Hoskins of robbing God by not paying tithes. This is a characteristically out-of-context reading of the Bible, as is tithing itself. The tribe of Levi received tithes, and passed on ten percent to the priests, because they could not own land in ancient Israel. The tithe was ten percent of everyone elses increase – produce, food stuffs. It was not intended to be used to buy flash mansions. In addition, people at that time did not already pay more than a third of their income in tax, some of which is used for similar purposes to the tithe.

As for the issue of swearing blind obediance, we need look no further than Rome for a comparison.

I've found the best way to understand the Bible is to read it cover to cover. Like the other reactionary churches, the teachings of Destiny seem to be based on a highly selective reading of it.
They make much of things, like homosexuality, that are rarely (and some argue never) mentioned in the Bible while seeming to ignore its major preoccupations, such as paying workers fairly, not being greedy, doing justice for the poor and not charging interest on money. As Yesus said, woe to them who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel, hooves and all.

None of this explains why Destiny Church is under attack for things common to so many churches. In fact it might be argued that the only reason the established churches don't still tithe is because they have already gathered vast wealth, invested it in land and share portfolios and do well enough out of the usury thereof, thank you very much. To my mind the reason is because Mr Tamaki doesn't just want your money, he wants your country as well. He has been remarkably frank about his lust for political power. He is said to have claimed to be the returned King David and to be building an army. He may find that is one blasphemy too far.

(from my Waikato Times column 19 March 2010)

Why copy Australia?

2010-03-15T18:38:00.002+13:00

One of the great mysteries of New Zealand politics is why our Governments always strive to be more like Australia. If the rest of us wanted to live in Australia, we'd move there.

To be fair they only mean economically speaking. Growth rates, wages rates, that sort of thing. The abstract measurements that sound impressive, but tell us nothing about what is important. Despite economists' attempts to reduce every value to a dollar amount, GDP - the sum of monetary transactions - cannot describe our psychological, social, cultural or ecological well-being. Neither do growth rates tell us about the levels of police corruption, intransigent judicial racism or mindless jingoism in a country.

We know that economic growth stopped adding to human happiness from about the 1960's, in the West, which makes the political obsession with it hard to fathom. But more importantly economic growth now seems to be making us less well off, overall. It's like spending the pension savings on fags and booze – the faster we do it, the worse off we are. So I wasn't trying to be clever when pointing out some of Australia's less savoury characteristics. Increasing New Zealand's economic growth will inevitably lead to a lower standard of living, in my opinion. Some of us will have more money and more stuff, but all of us will lose something of greater value.

Where would economic growth come from? The Government has floated the idea of digging up areas of high value conservation estate in order to flog off the minerals underneath. Right now, in Happy Valley on the West Coast, a rare ecosystem that is home to a number of rare or endangered species, is being pillaged to dig up coal to sell off-shore. Burning it will increase greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, leaving an ecological debt to our descendants, while the coal is expected to last around a decade. Ten years on, the coal will be gone, the money will be gone and we will have lost something far more precious, forever. The Government proposes more of that.

We can increase dairy output. This goes hand in hand with the killing of our streams and rivers, from taking more water for irrigation and increased run-off, even with best practise farming methods. It drives the consolidation of land ownership and the corporatisation of farming, with young farmers less and less able to afford to buy their own farm. Rural communities are being altered forever by the resulting transient workforce and lower population density.

Corporatisation and environmental destruction are not inevitable processes. They are the outcome of political decisions. What New Zealand, and the world, needs is not more growth, but a move to a steady state economy. There is already enough for everyone, but we are finding it hard to shake the idea that “bigger is always better”. Working out how to live within our ecological means is a much more worthy goal than copying our cousins over the ditch.

(from my TV3 website column

What is Simon Power up to?

2010-03-01T23:37:00.001+13:00

I know this sounds like I'm trying to undermine him, but I have to confess to liking Justice Minister Simon Power. We entered Parliament together and I found him to be a bright, energetic and basically decent chap. Some of his recent decisions, however, bear out my opinion on the brain haemorraging effects of too many years in Parliament

The first is the decision to close Te Hurihanga here in Hamilton. Most people, even the Garth McVicar's of the world, agree that the real answer to reducing crime is early and intensive intervention. Putting serious resources into steering young offenders off the path to a criminal career makes sense in every way. It costs less than locking them in prison for years later on. It costs less than the economic damage their crimes will cause. Most importantly, it prevents innocent people from becoming their victims. It is, as they say, a no-brainer.

Te Hurihanga is a pilot residential facility for young troublemakers. The idea began with a youth court judge, Carolyn Henwood, who was concerned about the lack of facilities for serious young offenders. It is based on extensive research from around the world about what kinds of things do, and don't, work. It was supported by the late Maori Queen, Te Atairangikaahu, and incorporates a strong bicultural ethos. It has some important business support. It's reoffending rate so far (although it is early days) is zero. It has rightly been described as world leading.

So why would you close it down? I know the heat is on government ministers to find ways to cut budgets, but this seems like the epitomy of false economy. Actually the Minister may get a surprise when he finds out what he is actually going to save from the closure. He has been saying publicly that it costs around $630,000 per graduate. He worked that out by adding up all the capital and operating costs to date (including construction) and dividing it by the 8 graduates so far. I'm not an accountant, but even I can see the numbers are dodgy.

What will happen to the 10 or so young people currently coming through the programme? What will happen to the expertise built up over the development of the pilot? How much will it cost to develop a new programme on the same site under the 'Fresh Start' brand? No one can say because, judging by the poor officials that had to front up to the staff and public at Te Hurihanga, they don't know what it will be replaced with.

I was feeling a bit sorry for old Simon after all this. I figured that he has not been getting enough sleep and is beginning to make erratic decisions. My diagnosis was confirmed shortly after by his paranoid response to the Law Commission review of drug policy. I was a bit sniffy about it myself, because it was supposed to be a first principles review and turned out to be no more than a little fiddle.

I had thought the Commission would look at different approaches to controlling drugs, evaluate the evidence and then make recommendations. I even fantasised that they might be courageous enough to say that licensing people to grow and sell cannabis is the best way to control it, according to the evidence. Make it R18, don't allow any advertising and cut the tie between cannabis and hard drugs by bringing it into the open.

I'm joking of course. I didn't really think they would have the guts to propose something so eminently sensible, but I did expect a proper evaluation of the options. Instead they presented a report that began with an article of faith - that commercial sales should remain prohibited. They offered a tiny sop: instant fines instead of convicting people like me for personal cannabis use; allow sick people to use it for medicine. Paah – that's a political negotiating position, not the conclusion from a systematic review of the evidence.

In any case,when he saw the summary Simon's knee jerked so hard that he booted himself in the face. That's what political ambition does for you though – impairs thinking and hypersensitises the reflexes. But I have a cure. I recommend that he lights up a fatty and chills out.

(from my Waikato Times column 26 Feb)

Just bought a ger

2010-02-19T14:15:00.006+13:00

It's second hand, made by Jaia of Motueka. I've been looking for an affordable ger (yurt) for many years now and consider these the best available for NZ conditions. Light covering, so it wouldn't stand up to a Mongolian winter, but fine for Aotearoa (although we'll see what its like come July). Very well designed, with khana that slot together without needing a tie, fitted covers, beautiful cedar poles, khana and door, and a very traditional toono (crown) (not sure which specific tribes it is based on).

The whole thing is shaped from the outside like a mongolian ger, but has no crown posts. It's a beautiful structure, and it now means we have somewhere to medititate, do tai chi and for Ngahuia to practise dance. It also means we can accomodate guests.

passing it on

2010-02-19T12:36:00.002+13:00

Just saw a great vid clip about indigenous Peruvians resisting the use of their ancestral land for oil extraction. Worth a look:

http://another-green-world.blogspot.com/2010/02/awajun-wampis-sequoia-boras-and.html

Law Commission review of the Misuse of Drugs Act

2010-02-12T07:16:00.001+13:00

I used to believe that if you got a bunch of intelligent people together around a table and presented them with all the evidence available on a subject, they would come up with some reasonably good answers. Today proved that there is at least one exception – the Law Commission.

In 2007 it was asked by the Associate Minister of Health to review the Misuse of Drugs Act. The terms of reference included a number of specific questions, but top of the list were whether legislation should be guided by harm minimisation, and the most suitable model (or models) for the control of drugs. It was, in effect, a first principles review of drug policy and coincided with the UN's review of the international conventions around psychoactive drugs.

The report has been delayed a few times, but lets not quibble about that. A thorough report that looks at all the options, evaluates them according to the evidence and then makes some recommendations based on that evaluation, can be expected to take time. The summary report that the commission delivered yesterday, however, makes me wonder what they spent their time doing because it is the most near reaching and narrow focussed 'first principles' review I have seen. It assumes the status quo – prohibition – without apparent question and focusses instead on tweaking its machinery.

All this reinforces the impression left by the 2007 report into search and surveillance powers that the commission should only be used for examining 'lawyers law', the important but obscure technical stuff that needs a dusting from time to time. The stuff that is so dry that no one has any interest in it beyond making the law work better. Drug policy, police powers of surveillance and seizure, these kinds of issues are at the sharp end of the relationship between the state and citizens. They have enormous social ramifications. When faced with these kinds of pressures, the commissioners (none of whom has ever faced the sharp edge of the law to the best of my knowledge) seem to become incapable of providing the kind of fearless independent advice the situation demands. In both cases they begin with fine words of principle, but then leave them at the door.

In case this sounds like sour grapes because their recommendations don't go as far as I'd like, lets be clear. I never expected the commission to say the things I would have said. What I did expect was an examination and evaluation of the options. By a priori ruling out a consideration of the best alternative to prohibition, the commission has poven itself to be gutless. There is plenty of theoretical and practical evidence to suggest that implementing a system of licensing and taxing the producers and sellers of relatively benign recreational drugs such as cannabis, BZP, MDMA and LSD would be the most effective way to reduce drug use (especially hard drug use) and to reduce the harms associated with drug use. The commission may not have be swayed by that evidence if they had examined it but the report suggests they barely even looked.

Unsurprisingly I've been told that the government has already said that it won't even look at the moderate recommendations that the commission has actually made – a less punitive approach to personal cannabis use and allowing its supervised medicinal use. If the commission thought that it would get some traction by being mealy mouthed when it comes to our rights (such as the right to determine what you put into your own body) they were mistaken. They might as well have shown some courage and made a decent job of it after all.

Cutting Dreadlocks

2010-01-28T21:19:00.000+13:00

There has been a lot of media interest in the cutting of my dreadlocks. To be expected really – the NZ media was always more interested in how I look than in what I had to say (Nice photos, shame about the radical korero). Given the dishonest and poisonous comments by people like Barry Soper, as well as the inability of most journalists to comprehend anything outside of their own narrow existence, I thought I had better offer some unmediated comment of my own.

I have cut my locks. Following the guidance provided in Numbers 20, I had it in my mind when I left Parliament that I may have to trim (having come into such intimate contact with the putrifying corpse of Babylon) but I was not sure. I felt that my spirit and mind had been polluted by Parliament – both by the abusive behaviour that is the standard operating procedure in there, and by the way that the institution coopts one's thinking. It is very difficult to resist becoming institutionalised by the machinery of power (or the illusion of power). The place narrows and constraints thinking. Creativity, different thinking, innovative ways of doing things – I felt that these had been squeezed out of me until there was no real juice left. My reality was increasingly being defined by the artificial and inherently shallow world in which I was living. That is what I mean by being polluted by Parliament.

Any Rasta idren will understand the reluctance to bring sissors upon I head, so even though I felt polluted I did not wish to cut my hair. In November I was in the forest and during a session of prayer I got the very clear message that yes, the time had come and I must cut my locks. The next day I did.

It has been a powerful experience. Having worn a crown for 20 years (almost exactly) it has taken a while to get used to not showing it. But it has been a renewal and a healing, like the shedding of a snake's skin. I have not renounced the livity or philosophy of Rastafari, but instead have used this as an opportunity to recommit Iself to the way of truth and life. This also means a re-radicalisation because I&I must do all we can to bring an end to this corrupt shitstem that values money more highly than life or the planet that we live upon.

I have spent the past year studying Management and Sustainability at Waikato University and have seen very clearly that the business world and governments have no real answers to our crisis. The most important cornerstone of eco-business is resource efficiency – an approach that fails in terms of reducing our impact on the planet. The paradox of greater efficiency is that it leads to a net increase in resource use. The real problem is economic growth itself – the fetishist goal of capitalists and governments all over the world.

This year I am studying Maori language full time. I am convinced that at least some of the answers we need are to be found in indigenous worldviews. In Aotearoa, tangata whenua are at the forefront of many struggles to protect ecological integrity. I am also convinced that these struggles will increasingly be against Iwi corporations, as the tensions between Maori worldviews and the requirements of capitalism become more acute.

I do not regret my time in Parliament. I learned a lot from it, I grew a lot and I met many fantastic people, both inside and outside the House. I also like to think I contributed something – a different perspective, a voice that had not been heard there before. I am proud of my accomplishments – the Waste Minimisation Act, an Independent Prison Inspectorate, the permitting of hemp growing in NZ, Clean Slate legislation among other things. But I am glad I left. My biggest fear was that I would become a career politician, someone for whom being in Parliament (or Government) is more important than what they do when they are there. Unfortunately, that describes most politicians.

So I remain a Nazarite Dread Rasta, a servant of the Most High, a Ras among Rases. Bless up.

Crying for Haiti

2010-01-22T11:27:00.002+13:00

It's hard to make sense of the enormity of what is happening in Haiti. It seems so unfair that some of the poorest people in the world should suffer this blow, delivered by the earth itself. Yet if anything, it is a reminder of how poverty and the environment are interlinked.

An earthquake, of course, is not affected by whether humans are benign or destructive to their environment. We don't yet know whether environmental damage added to the destruction caused by the earthquake, in the way that clearing mangrove swamps in Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka and India for shrimp farms and tourist resorts increased the damage from the 2004 tsunami. We do know that deforestation in Haiti has led to desertification of farmland and growing poverty and left the population vulnerable to floods, such as in 2004 when around 6,000 people died.

I've always found it hard to square the poverty and corruption of Haiti with its history as the first independent state in Latin America and the first post-colonial black run nation in the world. The story of how slave born leader Toussant L'Overture led a slave army to take over the island and repel both the Spanish and the British military forces is awe inspiring. Napolean's army also lost some 50,000 soldiers including 18 generals trying to retake the island, although they kidnapped L'Overture under the guise of a parley and imprisoned him until his death.

By 1825 Haiti was militarily weak enough for France to demand 150 million francs as reparation for lost profits from the slave trade. This contributed to political instability, as did US, British and German military incursions into Haiti. Last century the US held Haiti under military occupation for around twenty years, and then helped prop up the murderous regime of Papa Doc Duvalier and his 'Tonton Macoutes' death squads.

Which all helps to explain the international outcry over the massive US army invasion of Haiti in the wake of the earthquake. While Cuba has been landing hundreds of doctors in Haiti and in fact had hundreds already there as part of an aid program (Cuba exports doctors to poor countries while the US, Europe, Australia and New Zealand imports from them), the US has contributed thousands of soldiers. Soldiers can assist in recovery and reconstruction, and there is a concern about security in the face of massively inadequate food and medical supplies, but some US commentators have suggested that air dropping food and water would be a more effective way to reduce looting than flying in the Marines.

The logistics of the aid effort have been shambolic, it seems. Medicins San Frontiers has complained that people have died because of the repeated turning away of aircraft carrying essential medical supplies by the US army in favour of diplomats and US military personnel. Supplies on the ground in Port Au Prince remain undistributed. Tension grows as the population gets hungrier, although US army reports suggest that incidents of violence are below pre-earthquake levels.

I can't agree with Hugo Chavez that this is an occupation of Haiti in disguise. I think that the US effort is motivated by goodwill, but that the USA has come to rely on a military modus operandi. Barking men in camo is the answer to all problems, and so it is logical for the US to show its commitment by the number of troops in its Haiti surge. It's no more than the obvious outcome of an imperial mindset.

Neither do I mean to be unduly critical of the aid effort, since I am sure I couldn't coordinate a better one (but then I am neither trained or paid to do so). One thing we can be sure of is that following the failure of the Copenhagen negotiations the number of humanitarian crises will increase. The impacts of climate change will predominantly be felt by poor countries and they will be reliant on the rich world taking responsibility for the catastrophes it causes. Responding to this scale of emergency is something the world had better get good at.

Willie Apiata in Afghanistan

2010-01-21T19:48:00.003+13:00

The NZ Herald is defending the publication of a photo of two NZ SAS soldiers in Kabul, after it was revealed that one of them is corporal Willie Apiata, VC. Apparently there is a convention not to publish the identities of soldiers in action as it puts them in danger. In the words of PM John Key "we don't want (the Taliban)to know the names and individual identities of members of the SAS because of the nature of some of their operations, and they would be at a greater risk if they can be identified" and "It puts at risk the lives of those individual soldiers because they can now be recognised".

Am I stupid or is this as contrived a piece of rubbish as I think it is? I just don't understand how the Taliban knowing the name of NZ SAS operatives puts them in danger. Surely the Taliban are intent on killing ANY foreign invader infidels they can get to? It seems especially absurd since the original photo was not titled and it was the PM that confirmed it was him.

I would have thought not wearing a helmet in a battle zone was the greater danger, but what do I know?

La Carboneria

2009-12-24T15:43:00.004+13:00

The stage is not red, but deep crimson
marked with memories etched into its face
Three chairs stand, green beneath grand portraits
evoking the power of those greats

If you look you can see how she stamps, the bailaor
where she stands, how she fills the stage
her rutted tracks command the corners
pentrating layers of paint and board

How many million hammer blows
made those grooves?

Before the middle chair is a basin
shallow on the right side, deeply scarred on the left
The cantaor stamps but does not stand there
except in wild moments, or to accept applause

On the right the guitarrista sits
the crimson is polished to a glossy shine
A cascade flows from the glowing corner
a plateau above the field of love and pain

Historical and timeless this flamenco
the story of a people in movement and song
expressions of tragedy and defiance that transport me
to whom they can never belong

Santa Cruz, Sevilla
16/12/09

London climate change demonstration on Saturday

2009-12-08T02:40:00.009+13:00

I met up with green economist Derek Wall at Hyde Park to listen to speeches from Green Euro MP Caroline Lucas, the Bolivian Ambassador and others. Caroline was excellent, speaking about the Green New Deal, climate justice and the need for a grassroots direct action campaign to spur politicians to move beyond carbon markets to real action. All the greens seem to think she has a very good chance of winning Brighton in the next general election.

There was a relatively small crowd at Hyde Park but by the time we had reached Parliament it had swelled to a huge crowd. Newspaper estimates say 30,000 but as usual I think this underestimated. It was a most interesting juxtaposition marching through Mayfair, but the crowd was very well behaved. Police were few and discreet, having come under much criticism recently for their policing of demo's, especially since killing one man during a 'kettling' maneuver.

Some people have set up a Climate Camp in Trafagar Square apparently, so I plan to head down. In the meantime, here's some pics:

Los Angeles

2009-11-25T23:39:00.003+13:00

Behind enemy lines

Everywhere I go in Los Angeles I am reminded of America's essentially militarist nature. From the stealth bomber display in Exposition Park to the special rates at the circus for seniors, students and military personnel, the armed forces seem to underpin American society. And of course it is the young men and sometimes women of these Latino, black and poor white ghetttoes that I am bussing through that serve as the cannon fodder for that military machine.

The TV news over the last few nights has been dominated by three such soldiers, convicted last year of the summary execution in March 2007 of suspected guerillas in Iraq. CNN acquired videotapes of their interrogation, and the main thrust of their defence, and the media comment has been that the blame for those murders lies with the top brass. Not because they have been encouraging summary execution, mind you, but because soldiers in Iraq have recently been issued with instructions that when they detain suspected insurgents they need to provide some evidence of the alleged crime when they hand them over to be locked up: photos of the scene, eyewitness accounts, phyical evidence and things of that nature. Criticism has rightly (if lightly) touched on the lack of training on how to collect evidence and the reasonableness of expecting soldiers in the field to collect evidence of criminal activity in the middle of a war zone. This, of course, is the consequence of refusing to treat your opponents as POWs instead of criminals. However, the greater focus has been on the frustration of soldiers who detain Iraqis they suspect of being involved in attacks on US troops, only to see them released and back on the streets some time later. The few proponents for the policy given a voice on mainstream TV reply that you just can't lock people up indefinitely without actual evidence of criminal activity – although it need not be to the standard of 'beyond reasonable doubt' it would seem.

“When is the dividing line between armed conflict and murder crossed?” CNN asks rhetorically, arguing that it is understandable for US soldiers to march detainees into a gully and shoot them in the back of the head if they think that they are likely to be released if taken in for detention. They cite the release of some 75,000 of the approximately 86,000 people detained (roughly from memory) as evidence that the frustration is valid and that the evidence gathering policy is too onerous. The possibility that those people were released because there was little reason to think they were actually involved in attacks on US troops, beyond being in the vicinity when panicked troops were rounding people up, did not come up much in discussion.

The interesting thing as an observer was to see the studied avoidance by those both for and against the new policy of the principle underlying problem. These people are not criminals engaged in violent crime, in the normal sense of the word. They are guerillas fighting a foreign occupying army with whatever pitiful weapons they have at their disposal. Whatever you think of Saddam Hussein, Al Qaeda or the tactics being used, that is the essential reality. You either set up concentration camps for vast numbers of civilians on the basis that they are involved in or support the insurgency (a fine tradition begun by the British fighting Boers in South Africa and perfected by German and more recently Serbian forces in Europe) or you figure a way to get the hell out with as little loss of life and face as possible. I guess that is where the US administration is at, but CNN et al have not quite caught up with the play.

Why do museums make my legs ache?

Its weird – I can walk for a reasonable length of time on the street or on a track, but wandering round a museum or art gallery for a couple of hours just kills me. Fascination battled fatigue and aching limbs today at the California African American Museum where we wandered a small but engaging display of African American history in California. Some very fine art works by Faith Ringgold and Willaim Pajaud particularly moved me, as did the photographs, film, music and spoken poetry covering the bebop and beatnik movements. The sheer creative outpouring and entrepreneurialism of black americans in those periods was inspiring, as they invented new art forms and musical styles and established and took control of their own venues. All this was brought to a rapid and seemingly deliberate end as the city decided to 'assist' poor black people by bulldozing whole blocks of Fillmore in San Fransisco, the area at the centre of this vibrant cultural spring, and relocating people to the suburbs.

A particular gem for me was coming across the name of Bob Kaufman. I've read a bit of Ginsberg and Kerouac, but hadn't heard of Kaufman until today. What I heard of his work was wonderful, although much of his poetry was spontaneous public performance and never recorded. Apparently much of what survives is due to his wife hurriedly writing down his words as he orated at a restaurant or bar or in private, although a cache of writings was found miraculously preserved in the attic of a building that burned down, although the entire place was otherwise destroyed. Great stuff, and a museum worth visiting.

We also visited the Getty Centre, an architecturally very interesting space with an impressive collection of works. Poor Pirimaia found it hard going (tips on how to make visits to art galleries more interesting for 6 years olds most welcome) but after spending over an hour on the bus to get there we weren't inclined to rush. In any case the collection was worth spending time on, ranging from painting and pastels / watercolours to tapestry and French decorative arts of the 1700's to sculture and a guide to forging bronze. The exhibitions richly demonstrated how European art developed over the last few hundred years, although without delving into contemporary work. My only critical comment is that it was a shame to visit yet another gallery which seems to be based on the theory that only European heritage art is worthy of collection and display. We largely suffer from the same myopia in New Zealand, and although do we have a heightened awareness of Maori artforms since Te Maori we still seem to ignore the rich artistic traditions of the vast majority of the world.

More on the ETS, the Maori Party and Hone Harawira

2009-11-23T11:46:00.001+13:00

There is blood in the water. The emission trading scheme now looks like nothing more than a bait ball for hungry sharks, and the feeding frenzy is on. The National / Maori Party scheme will hand around $110 billion from New Zealand taxpayers to businesses while doing nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Federated Farmers, not content with the bulk of the fishy proceeds, wants to vacuum up the whole damn lot. They are calling for the Government to scrap the entire scheme without offering a proposal they would support, other than taxpayers picking up 100% of their tab. With all this, it's hard to blame corporate iwi leaders for wanting to get a feed as well. They are currently negotiating (we hear) to plant native trees on conservation land and grab the carbon credits.

The problem arises, of course, because the Government's proposed changes to the emission trading scheme are so contrary that they subsidise the polluters – farmers and industry – and punish the foresters. Maori forestry owners are doubly penalised because many of their forests were planted before the Kyoto agreement was signed and so don't get carbon credits. It doesn't seem impossible to come up with a scheme that actually reduces emissions and treats (pre and post Kyoto) forests fairly, but both National and the Maori Party seem more interested in getting special treatment for their respective powerful lobbies than doing something for the planet.

This has been described in The Guardian (UK) as the worlds “most shameless two fingers to the global community” from “a country that sells itself round the world as 'clean and green'”. New Zealand got a pretty sweet deal in the Kyoto agreement, agreeing to hold rather than reduce our rate of greenhouse gas emissions. We have continued to plead for special treatment ever since, even though we have one of the highest per capital emission rates in the world. Expectations on what will happen at next month's climate change negotiations in Copenhagen vary, but I think that New Zealand can expect to be shamed and embarassed. We certainly deserve it.

Which brings me to Hone Harawira. I've always seen 'motherf***er' as a very literal term describing those who despoil the Earth. Reading his email I don't think he was making a statement about all white people, and while I don't know if he uses that term the same way, it does actually describe quite a lot of colonial history. His words were rash and unwise, but may not have been so shocking if people more fully understood our own recent past, such as the 'scorched earth' policies inflicted in Te Urewera or the bloody invasions of the Waikato.

That's why I can't help feeling that there is more to the Maori Party's attempt to oust him than meets the eye. It has been obvious for some time that Hone is uneasy about the Maori Party's relationship with National and their voting record on things like the emission trading scheme. However, stories have been circulated in the party that Hone is actually upset because he didn't get a ministerial post. What is surprising is that a number of people seem to actually believe it. It looks suspiciously like a deliberate attempt to undermine his credibility in the party, prior to attempting to remove him.

Hone is almost certainly the leadership's most challenging MP, but it would be a grave mistake to think that ousting him would solve the Party's problems. A number of Maori Party activists are also finding the party's current direction difficult to swallow and might view Hone's departure as proof that there is no place left for them in the Maori Party. The Party has always had a difficult challenge in balancing heterogenous Maori interests, and now seems in danger of forgetting that sweet fruits come from healthy roots.

(from myy Waikato Times column 20 November 2009)

Telling it like it is about meat

2009-10-29T09:32:00.003+13:00

Lord Stern, author of the most comprehensive economic analysis of the impacts of climate change and former chief economist of the World Bank has told The Times that people need to become vegetarian to combat climate change.

Some people have been saying this for years. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation published a report in 2006 called 'Livestock's Long Shadow', which states that the meat industry is “one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems" and that "urgent action is required to remedy the situation". Pastoral farming contributes around 18% of global GHG emissions - more than transport, and is probably the biggest sectoral contributor to water pollution. In NZ, of course, pastoral farming contributes around 50% of our GHG emissions.

To put that into perspective, Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin of the University of Chicago have calculated that a vegan driving an SUV has a smaller carbon footprint than a meat eater on a bicycle.

Seen in this light, the claim that NZ farmers 'feed the world' is really a bunch of disingenuous crap. Intensively growing animal protein is enormously profitable, but is ecologically destablising and destructive. It also produces a fraction of the food that growing plants would produce. In my view New Zealand needs start planning how to move to a more plant based economy rather than continue to argue that we can't cut GHG emissions (or improve water quality) because there are very limited ways to reduce emissions from livestock. I have a very effective method: reduce their numbers.

This is heresy in this country, and in the UK too, it seems. The meat industry has reacted with outrage and disbelief to Sterns suggestions. Kind of like the way the British arms industry reacted to the campaign to ban land mines.

Good on Stern - I admire his willingness to speak up on this very sensitive issue. Interestingly he didn't go so far as to suggest veganism. I don't know about the UK, but here in Aotearoa the dairy industry is a lot more of an environmental problem than meat. Still, its a very good start.

Unified African delegation at Copenhagen to demand reparations

2009-10-25T22:30:00.003+13:00

From The African Executive:

The 12th Ordinary Session of the African Union Assembly of Heads of State and Government held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia adopted a historic decision on climate change the key elements of which include:

a) That the global carbon trading mechanisms that are expected to emerge from international negotiations on climate change should give Africa an opportunity to demand and get compensation for the damage to its economy caused by global warming and underlines the fact that despite contributing virtually nothing to global warming Africa has been one of the primary victims of its consequences.

b) That Africa needs to be represented by one delegation, which is empowered to negotiate on behalf of all Member States, with the mandate to ensure that resource flow to Africa is not reduced.

Fantastic. A single African delegation whose mission its to hold to account all those nations that continue to spew CO2 into the atmosphere with virtually no regard for the enormous number of deaths this is causing and will cause in the poorest of countries. GO AFRICA!

Article on Sue Bradford in todays Herald on Sunday

2009-10-25T21:14:00.007+13:00

Matt Nippert has written an article about Sue Bradford in todays Herald on Sunday that is rather predictable. The only interesting element from my point of view is the possibility of Sue running for the Auckland council. I had heard the rumour before, but thought it unlikely because of her comments about returning to grassroots politics. In the article Sue appears careful to say positive but non committal things about the possibility, so it looks like I may have been wrong. She would certainly be a great person to have on there and I sincerely hope she does get elected if she decides to stand.

I also make a brief appearance, when Matt has me commenting that the Greens internal structure and semantic peculiarities (calling the party whip a 'musterer') have led to a lack of cohesion. This is not actually what I said. In fact I do think that the Greens message has been somewhat incoherent for a number of years, but as a result of the inability (or unwillingness) to operate as a team not because of its structure. It has been more a question of leadership style IMO.

The section 59 campaign was a good example. Matt quotes an ex Green staffer calling it a propaganda disaster, and I agree. Sue won the legislative battle, but at significant cost to the Greens and Labour. Some may say that Green voters don't support baby bashing anyway but this misses the point - I met many people at the time who were potential Green voters who were confused and unsure about the legislation. Some of them were fiercely anti-smacking, but they were unsure about how the law would affect ordinary parents. Leaving it to police discretion was not a satisfactory answer - especially if they had personal experience of police prejudice or racism - and to make that answer just sounded reckless to them.

If the Greens had taken a collective approach to both strategising and delivering on that strategy, I think it would have been a far superiour campaign. Instead I recall being brushed off when I asked how to respond to some of the concerns that had been expressed to me - what might have been an opportunity to collectively think about messaging was seen, I suspect, as irksome negativity. MPs usually campaigned in isolation and Sue is particularly hard to shift once her mind is decided - this, of course, is part of her strength.

Matt is a good journalist, but I felt that he avoided getting into a deeper layer of Green politics and a more substantial discussion of where the tensions are in favour of reiterating the same superficial dualisms of Sue the radical and the Green drift rightwards. I for one am uncomfortable with purported media quotes from Russel saying that the role of the Greens is to save capitalism from itself, but rightwards is not the inevitable trajectory of the Greens. The green alternative to the materialism of socialism is not the materialism of capitalism, but something much more profound.

Speech on the State Terror Raids - 2 years on

2009-10-19T00:09:00.004+13:00

From my speech to open the 'Explosive Expression' art auction to raise funds for the defendants, Thistle Hall, Wellington 17 October 2009

I don't think it is necessary to recite the events of 15th October 2007. The details are well covered on the 'October 15th solidarity' website. But what I would like to do is reflect for a moment on the implications for us today, two years later. These are well illustrated by the main story in todays Dominion Post. The cover has a huge article with photo, based on a “rare interview with a serving member of the Armed Offenders Squad”. In case you missed it, there is also the whole of D1 and D2 - the front page and second pages of the Insight section. This coverage highlights the increasingly difficult objective that the police now have in relation to these charges, which is to come out at the end of these trials without more serious embarrassment.

You will recall that the case began with a triumphant trumpeting of how police has busted a major terror ring. That has now been reduced to some illegal firearms charges, although there has been a late attempt to construct some flimsy 'criminal gang' charges. We are yet to see what evidence the police will even be able to bring to court. And now, just as the country seemed to be forgetting all about this embarrassing case, the October 15th solidarity committee has pu tit all back on national TV! So clearly, these article in the DomPost are not a coincidence. They are a police fluff piece, a propaganda fight back.

The other police objective is to drain as much of the resources as they can from the activist community. Every activist in the room has seen this tactic before. Police have unlimited funds to take prosecutions – not just for the legal team but for police appearances in court, transport and all of the machinery of the legal system. The defendants, on the other hand, appear in court at a huge personal cost, both financial and otherwise. They have to get to hearings, they have to accommodate themselves and feed themselves while they stay in Auckland, they have to transport themselves to and from court, plus there is the time and the enormous amount of emotional energy burned up in these cases. The depositions hearings recently concluded took about 5 weeks, and the trials will take much longer. That is why is event is so crucial, both in terms of demonstrating solidarity and support for the defendants and in helping in a practical, financial way. The money raised tonight will not go to pay lawyers, but will be spent on meeting those basic needs.

The second thing todays paper illustrates is the continued collusion between the police and the mainstream media, particularly Fairfax. When the arrests were first made public, I clearly recall the general public mood being one of suspended disbelief. It all seemed a bit unlikely and people were waiting to see what the evidence looked like. Even the general accusations of guns, napalm and terror training manuals being flung around by Helen Clarke and others did not really convince people. The illegal publication by the Dominion Post and other Fairfax media outlets of highly selective, misleading and sensationalist extracts of surveillance transcripts changed all that. Even some people with a history of supporting activism were moved to make public comments hostile to the defendants. That those extracts were unattributed only served to tar all the defendants with those allegations.

When the Solicitor General prosecuted them for contempt of court over those extracts the High Court decided in favour of Fairfax. The Court said that Fairfax should have instead been charged by the police for breaching both court suppression orders and those provisions of the Crime Act against disclosure of intercepted communications, stating that “we are at a loss to understand why these breaches were not prosecuted”. I'm not at a loss. They were not prosecuted because those leaks benefited the police. I do not have any evidence to prove that the police actually gave Fairfax the nod, but it seems likely to me. Today's articles are simply an extension of that cosy symbiotic relationship.

We can take these articles as proof of a successful week! The State terror raids have been put back on top of the public's mind. The initiative has been seized and regained. A creative and imaginative response to attempted State intimidation has been effected. Solidarity and trust have been enhanced. In supporting this auction tonight you are supporting the defendants and their communities. You are also supporting the right to do activism. You are defending the space to do activism. We need that space now more than ever before, so please bid generously tonight. Bid extravagantly. Bid irresponsibly. It is your civic duty!

Is Keith's republican bill avoiding the real issue?

2009-10-16T18:12:00.004+13:00

I would love us to become a republic. Watching some historical films about the English monarchy and the parasites that surround them has re-inspired a powerful republican sentiment in me. It is not that I dislike the Windsors, but they are the result of more than a thousand years of inbreeding and (sometimes fatally) hostile family dynamics. Who on earth would want them as our Heads of State?

If Green MP Keith Locke gets his way, we will all get a chance to vote on it. His private members bill – the Head of State Referendum Bill – is set to be debated in Parliament and, if it passes, would force a public referendum to decide between three options for our Head of State: keeping the Queen; someone elected by the people; or someone selected by 75% of Parliament. If no option gets more than 50% of the vote, a second (run-off) referendum will be held featuring only the two most popular options.

I don't want the bill to pass. I do very much want it to pass a first reading and go to select committee. The people of New Zealand deserve an opportunity to have a say on whether we want royals or not, and the select committee public process would be a good start. In addition, it will spark a national debate in a constitutionally illiterate nation. That status is not surprising since most school don't teach civics education or even much New Zealand history, but it is shameful.

For all that, New Zealand will not, and should not, make such an important constitutional change by way of a private members bill. Keith is well intentioned but his bill is deeply flawed. It is a hasty fix – like slapping a plaster on an acid burn. What we need is slower and more considered debate, because the issue goes well beyond whose face is on the coins. The Queen (acting through the Governor General) can dissolve Parliament or refuse to assent to legislation for example, but she does not act because to do so would put her position in jeopardy. An elected President may feel that they have a democratic mandate to use those powers, causing a huge shift in our careful constitutional balancing act.

More importantly it is the constitutional thinking that underpins the monarchy that needs challenging – the peculiar British notion of the indivisibility of sovereignty. Many nations recognise that different functions of sovereignty can be exercised in different places – hence the sovereign status of various Indian nations as Indigenous people, and of individual States in the USA, or the very localised decision-making in Swiss Cantons. This is also what the Treaty of Waitangi promises in article 2 – the tino rangatiratanga (autonomy) of hapu. Keith's bill says that Treaty obligations would remain unchanged, but this ignores the bigger possibility to develop a constitution that truly reflects the partnership foreseen in the Treaty and our place in the Pacific Triangle. The highly centralised notions of power that dominate New Zealand political thinking are great for the rich and powerful but act against the interests of both Maori and Pakeha communities striving to maintain social and ecological stability in the face of the corporate steamroller. Just ask the people trying to stop iron sand mining or electricity transmission lines.

David Nielsen, in the 'Radical Rethink' lecture series run by Continuing Education at Waikato University spoke about possible responses to our environmental and social problems, and referred to the need for a 'cosmopolitan democracy' that recognises and empowers different levels of governance at a global, regional, national and local level, but whose fundamental principle was based on supporting and encouraging local autonomy. That is where we need to take the republican debate, in my view. Swapping the Queen for some other toff means nothing to me.

(from my Waikato Times column 16 October 2009)

NB I am speaking at the 'Radical Rethink' lecture series on 27th October at 6.30pm, AG.30, Gate 8

Latest ? Nigerian scam

2009-09-30T14:51:00.003+13:00

I got an email from my friend the other day saying that he was on a contract in Africa working on HIV and youth education issues across three countries, and had had his bag taken with all his passport, money, credit card etc. He was getting temporary travel papers from the embassy, but it would take about 4 days and he owed about $2500 to the hotel and had no money for food. Could I transfer some money and he would pay me back when he got home?

Well, I've had a few people try to scam me but this was from a friend who might well be in this position. I've been stranded in foreign countries before under similar circumstances and both know how desperate a person feels, and also that the story sounds quite feasible eg the embassy in my experience provides papers but won't help with money.

It read a little stilted, but maybe stress?

Anyway I decided I'd better ring his family and see what they knew and check out Western Union, which is how he asked me to transfer the money. The woman at the Travelex, when I told her the story, said that I should beware - she had had another similar case a month before and it had turned out to be a scam. Someone had used an internet station somewhere and their webmail log-in had been cracked and used to access that persons full contact list.

I rang my friend's mobile, and he answered from his house near Wellington. It wasn't his email, he assured me, although he was aware of the problem and was trying to get hotmail to sort it out.

I almost fell for it, because it appeared to be from someone I knew, so beware. Anyway now I'm seeing how long I can string my new Nigerian friends along for.

My thoughts on Sue Bradfords resignation

2009-09-28T15:08:00.002+13:00

Sue Bradford announced last week that she is leaving Parliament, citing disappointment at losing the co-leadership contest. It's an honest statement and she is to be admired for that. She did not add that she is unhappy at the direction the Green Party is headed, but there is no doubt that she would have steered a very different course from that intended by the current leadership. Perhaps she saw little place for herself in the new, unaligned, Green Party.

Sue was a sometimes controversial figure, but there is no doubt that she has played a key role in the early development of the Parliamentary Greens. She has also played an important role in Parliament, but that is all about to change. Despite her brave face, life after Parliament will be hard to adjust to. Once gone, she is unlikely to get any support from the Greens during this difficult transition, and I hope that her personal support system is strong. She will need it.

Her stated desire to get back to the grassroots is most welcome. The Green Party has often been criticised for sucking the energy out of the grassroots movement and expending it on getting people elected. Green MPs are useful to have in the House, but the Green Party does need to consider how it returns nutrients to the soil from whence it sprung. Shedding leaves from the top is one way of doing that. With her considerable knowledge base and extraordinary capacity for work, Sue will certainly build some humus in the community. I wish her well.

The question of where this leaves the Party is interesting. With both Sue and Jeanette stepping down early the Greens caucus will soon include David Clendon and Gareth Hughes. David is a small business advisor and works with the Sustainable Business Network. He has the potential to build much stronger links with small business and new business and this, as I have said before, is crucial to enlarging a uniquely Green constituency, one that is so poorly served, practically and ideologically, by both Labour and National.

Gareth is a young and creative climate change campaigner. He will strengthen important connections with the growing movement around climate change, especially its energetic and passionate youth activists. He will also bring experience with e-organising and campaigning methods that will help cement the Greens reputation as the most innovative and tech-savvy party political campaigners. The crucial issue will be whether the Green caucus is capable of supporting him well in an environment that is hostile to young people and innovative thinking. It will be a test of the co-leadership's ability to create a strong team that looks after its players, something the party has not really managed to achieve in the past.

Along with new MPs Kennedy Graham and Kevin Hague, David and Gareth signify a change in the Green Party's political orientation and flavour. The Old Left element of the party, once so influential, will be scarcely represented once Sue has left. Keith Locke, considered by many to be the archetypical communist, is actually nothing of the sort. While he is the oldest member of the Green caucus, his mental youthfulness and his sense of empathy have prevented him from becoming sufficiently doctrinaire. With this new influx, the Green Party is likely to become a more emphatically 'green-wing' party than has been possible in the past.

Does this mean that the Green Party will become less radical? I doubt it. The Green Party, for all its hype, has never been particularly radical. Sue has enjoyed a well deserved reputation for militancy, but this is hardly the same thing. Militancy is a strategic position. Radicalism is about the fundamental goals, and whether the solutions being offered address the root causes of the problems at hand. Sue Bradford is known and respected for her work around poverty, but her solutions have largely focussed on such things as benefit rises, workers rights and more state support for the community sector. These are worthy and important goals, but State munificence and higher wages cannot substitute for genuine social and ecological connectedness, nor for reducing resource consumption.

The departure that does threaten to deradicalise the Greens, in my view, is Jeanette Fitzsimons. Although she is not militant, she possesses a dangerous mind (dangerous, that is, to the status quo). She has spent considerable time thinking about what the fundamental causes of our ecological and social disintegration are, and the contradictions and difficulties we face in attempting to address them. Of course articulating this in public is a risky business for politicians and while Jeanette was not always effective at painting a broad green vision in the public mind, it always looked like she saw one. It may not be the role of a political party to advocate truly radical solutions, but unless the Greens continue to think about them they risk being shipwrecked on the shoals of immediacy.

Fear factor politics and the Maori Party

2009-09-18T22:38:00.003+12:00

Parliament must have seemed like a bad episode of Fear Factor this week, at least for Maori Party climate change spokesperson Rahui Katene. Following an excellent performance in the first stunt – the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) review – she found herself having to eat a maggot infested corpse without vomiting for stage two. I don't think that it is to her credit that she succeeded.

I doubt she was alone in wanting to vomit at the Maori Party's support for the new ETS. It must have been an interesting caucus meeting that made the decision to support watering down New Zealand's climate change policies, and I doubt it was made by consensus. When the Maori Party caucus decided to take a position contrary to numerous public statements by Katene, including the insightful comments that she wrote for the ETS review, it looked from outside like a political back-stab. It would seem that the mana of the Maori Party's relationship with National has become more important than the mana of their own MPs.

The scramble to pull her minority report from the ETS review, after the report had already been voted and agreed, just added to the humiliation. It would be pointless to speculate whether she was told to pull it, or whether it was her own decision once she realised that her position was being undermined, but the fact that it was unsuccessful did not help. It would seem that it was during leader to leader discussions that the Party agreed to support an ETS full of everything they had opposed in the past. If that is the case, the more interesting question is whether the co-leaders were unaware of the positions she had staked out in the report and in media interviews, or whether they just didn't care.

The internal dynamics of the Maori Party may be interesting, in a reality TV kind of way, but far more significant is what this will actually do to the environment. The answer is worse than nothing – it will continue to spur the growth in New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions. The whole point of an ETS, or carbon tax as the Maori Party has said they prefer, is to get the 'price signals' right. Under our current economic system it is often cheaper and easier to pollute than to be clean. Proper price signals make it cheaper to not pollute, by incorporating the cost of pollution into products and services.

The ETS being put forward by National and the Maori Party will not do this. While it does finally put a price on carbon from next year, it limits it to $25 a tonne, ensuring that it remains ineffectively low. In addition, for the first two years big polluters only need to pay for half of their emissions. Most importantly, the scheme will be based on the intensity of emissions, something previously opposed strongly by the Maori Party, with good reason. An intensity based scheme may drive more carbon efficient production, but will almost certainly increase the overall level of emissions. It's like trying to overcome alcohol addiction by moving to spirits – a more efficient way to cirrhosis of the liver.

The government is counting on increased forestry plantings to counter our high emission levels, but the even further delayed entry of New Zealand's biggest emitter – agriculture – makes it likely that yet more forests will be cleared for dairy farms. The price cap on carbon also makes forestry less attractive. The crazy thing is that any gains the Maori Party won for poor people from their about-face would be better paid for by fully charging polluters and using that money. A potential win – win has been turned into another loss for the earth.
(from my Waikato Times column 18 September 2009)

more on dogs and culture

2009-08-25T20:31:00.002+12:00

You have to laugh when Pakehas tells Tongans to respect the culture of New Zealand, especially when it comes to eating dogs. Putting a dog into an earth oven is part of the culture of this land. This is, after all, Polynesia.

Don't get me wrong – I'm personally no more likely to eat a kuri than I am a pig, but when the Minister for Agriculture, and meat farmer, David Carter gets self righteous about Paea Taufa (humanely) knocking off his pitbull terrier and cooking it, I can't help snorting aloud. Maybe the Minister is trying to ingratiate himself with the animal rights people in a bid to pave the way for resuming live sheep exports, but what a bunch of arse. Actually I reckon that Mr Taufa should be commended.

Not so much for preempting the potentially serious problem of a dog that was trying to bite the neighbours, although that alone should give the hysterical cause to pause. No, I think that in this time of recession and ecological crisis, with the NZ economy dependent on an commodity producing agricultural sector that is (with a few notable exceptions) environmentally reckless if not vandalistic, and as we accelerate into the last few years of the Oil Age, any tendencies towards self sufficiency should be encouraged. For incorrigible carnivores, dog eating may be the way of the future.

Actually guinea pigs and rabbits are probably a better source of meat. They can be kept on small areas of lawn and are far more efficient at converting grass to protein than cows or sheep. They are cheap to buy, easy to breed, and (I imagine) simple to dispatch. And as well as the economic and environmental arguments, I reckon there is a moral question too. No one should eat meat who isn't prepared to kill the animal and butcher it themself.

I don't imagine the people down at Turangawaewae preparing the feasts for the coronation week are squeamish about butchering. Mind you, I don't imagine they are eating guinea pig either. Lots of ordinary pigs, cows and sheep, though, will be going through those kitchens as workers toil to feed the thousands of people descending on Ngaruawahia to pay their respects to King Tuheitia. I suspect that David Carter will not be there, honouring the culture of New Zealand. In fact most Pakeha New Zealanders will be only dimly aware, at best, of this major event in the Maori calendar.

So whenever I hear Pakeha complain about dog eating, or burkas or people squatting on the lav, or object to hearing foreign languages spoken around then, I can't help reflecting on the fact that after more than 160 years of us being in this country, most of us have only the most perfunctory idea about Maori culture, Maori language, Maori values or Maori aspirations. We live in a parallel universe, it seems, yet one so close to us that we bump shoulders with it every day.

Part of the reason, I suspect, is because most Pakeha don't really see ourselves as part of an ethnic group with a culture of our own. We see culture and ethnicity as words to describe other people's quirky ways and how they differ from the norm, as defined by us. Think 'ethnic food' and it is more likely to be dog that springs to mind than lamb and mint sauce. Maybe that's why the whole Maori Flag debate is so important. In some ways recognising one is an easy symbolic gesture for the Government, but it's a powerful one all the same. It says we are not one homogeneous people, and we are no longer scared of that basic truth.

from my Waikato Times column 22 August 2009

IPCCC doesn't stand for Ignoring the People at the Climate Change Consultations

2009-07-31T10:17:00.002+12:00

Governments are not very good at asking the people what they want. Understandable I guess – they don't do it often (triennially) and they don't really think that they should have to.

By people I don't mean corporate lobbyists, of course. I've never been sold on the idea that a company is a legal person. If they were people, even the Australian banks in this country would be paying tax. Anyway the corporations that fill the political parties' election coffers always get their say, regardless of which way the election swings.

No, by people I mean the ones the whole political and economic system is supposedly for. Politicians have this strange notion that because they can cobble together a majority of MPs in Parliament they have a democratic mandate to enact all their policies, even the obscure ones. Actually most voters probably have only a vague knowledge (at best) of party policy, beyond the headline issues. For people who only see a choice between Coke or Pepsi (as Russel Norman famously called Labour and National), why bother to compare all the food additives?

Now I'm not suggesting that we should all be consulted to death on every policy. In fact the select committee process is pretty good for getting people's views on most issues before Parliament (or would be if our schools taught civics education so that people knew what a select committee actually is). But I do think the public should get a say on the big questions. By which I don't just mean sex, drugs and smacking children.

What I mean is things like New Zealand's 2020 greenhouse gas emissions target. 2020 is only a decade away, but the implications of that target are going to be significant for the next hundred years. Climate change is a watershed issue with a dividing line, in my view, is between those that cannot imagine anything much different from the status quo, and those who recognise that the status quo is a dead end, down which we are rapidly accelerating.

So I congratulate the Government on holding public meetings to talk about climate change. At the Hamilton one I saw a clear majority for a strong, I would say responsible, target. It could also be described as the most scientifically defensible target. Unfortunately the Minister for Climate Change Issues, Nick Smith, has already misread the economics and stated that reducing our emissions by 40% , as is being called for at public meetings, would cost NZ about $15 billion a year, or around $3000 per person. This is simply not true.

The NZIER report he is quoting does not actually say that. In fact it contains so many arbitrary assumptions that it does not say much of anything that is informative. First of all, it assumes that whatever international commitment we adopt, the Government won't change any policies to help us meet them and that our actual greenhouse gas emissions will reduce by the same rate regardless. This means that the estimated cost differences between weak and responsible commitments are based on the price of simply buying emission permits on the world market.

Secondly it assumes that regardless of the cost of buying carbon permits, no new technologies will develop and no more forests will be planted. This is an unbelievable assumption for an economic analysis to make and deeply flawed. Thirdly, it uses a 'worst case scenario' of $200 per tonne of carbon to work out the costs at a 40% commitment, but uses $100 per tonne to work out the costs for smaller commitments. When these three factors are combined, the report looks intellectually dishonest but very useful for propaganda purposes.

It is worth examining what it would cost to reduce our emission by 40% from 1990 levels, and how it could be most cost effectively achieved. But lets not fall for the old lie that There Is No Alternative (to mugging our grandchildren).

(from my Waikato Times column 31 jULY 2009)

Medical marijuana bill defeat an indictment on NZ MP's

2009-07-03T13:48:00.001+12:00

I have a friend who wakes up every morning and wants to vomit. Most of the day he wants to vomit. Food often makes him actually vomit, and he sometimes vomits blood. The doctors have given him some pills for the nausea but they are hard to keep down. There is one very effective inhalant that his specialist has recommended, but he is not allowed to use it.

Another friend is tetraplegic. That's like paraplegic but with all four limbs incapacitated. He lives in constant pain. The doctors gave him morphine and other pain killers, but he won't use them because he becomes like a zombie when he does. He doesn't have much quality of life, as you can imagine, so anything that gives him some is very welcome. He found a herbal remedy that takes the edge off his pain, makes it manageable and gives him some get-up-and-go. Apparently a lot of people with spinal injuries use it, but when my friend grew some the police arrested him and a judge locked him in Mount Eden prison.

The medicine in both these cases is called cannabis. Whatever people think about the recreational use of cannabis, I find it difficult to believe that anyone thinks sick people should suffer needlessly. Yet they are. Many sick people around New Zealand have tried everything the doctors can offer to no effect, and they know for a fact that cannabis is the only thing that works. They are not asking for a Pharmac subsidy. They are just asking us to please stop arresting them.

This week the Parliament was given a chance to vote on a proposal to do that. It would have allowed sick people to use cannabis for specified illnesses, if they had the written support of their doctor or a specialist. Metiria Turei's private member's bill provided for verified medical cannabis users to register with the Medical Officer of Health and police and get a Medical Cannabis Identification Card. This would exempt them from criminal prosecution for cannabis use, so long as they abided by the conditions.

The bill could be tidied up I'm sure. Police would have comments about potential snags and loopholes, doctors might disagree about the list of specific illnesses. That is what the select committees process is for. Unfortunately no one will get a say because Parliament voted overwhelmingly to keep prosecuting sick people for therapeutic use of cannabis.

Its hard to say why. The debate was full of the usual drug hysteria but I know for a fact that most MPs don't believe those old tired lies. I have had too many tell me privately that they agree with allowing medical use, even as they indicated that they would have to vote against it. No matter how necessary, humanitarian and cautious the bill, they don't want to be seen to be “pro-drugs”.

I can't resist commenting that this doesn't prevent them attending drug glamourising events such as the Air New Zealand Wine Awards. Drug samples are handed out with abandon at Beehive functions, and Associate Minster of Health Peter Dunne has even received money from multinational drug dealing company British American Tobacco (I'm sure it wasn't a bribe because it was only 100 pounds and surely no politician could be bought that cheaply).

That's a diversion though, because this particular debate is not about the usual drug hypocrisy. It is simply about the State denying very sick people the right to use their medicine. Double standards frustrate me, but the disinterested and vicious cruelty of New Zealand's MPs this week has angered and disgusted me.

(from my Waikato Times column, 3/7/09)

Bain found not guilty - how about something for the rest of the wrongfully imprisoned

2009-06-06T16:23:00.002+12:00

David Bain has just been found not guilty for the 1994 murder of his family in Dunedin– a series of killings he was convicted for in 1995. He spent 13 years in prison and it was only after a massive and dedicated effort by supporters, in particular Joe Karam, that his initial conviction was quashed and he was free on bail to be retried.

There is a lot of speculation about whether he will get compensation. I'm not going to add my thoughts. What interests me is the many other people in prison for crimes they did not commit. Former High Court judge Sir Thomas Thorp, in his 2006 report into miscarriages of justice in New Zealand, suggested that as many as twenty people might be wrongfully imprisoned for serious offenses in New Zealand. He cited work in 2002 by Bruce MacFarlane, the then Deputy Attorney General of Manitoba, on what factors make a miscarriage of justice more likely.

MacFarlane listed four predisposing factors: public pressure for a conviction, unpopular defendants, lawyers turning the process of trial into a game, and noble cause corruption - that is, persuading witnesses to alter their testimony, or planting evidence, because police genuinely believe that the person charged is guilty.

He also listed eight direct causes. These were: eyewitness misidentification; police mishandling of the police investigation; inadequate disclosure by the prosecution; unreliable scientific evidence; using criminals as witnesses, such as jailhouse informants; inadequate defence work; false confessions; and misleading circumstantial evidence. He said that these factors are present throughout the Commonwealth jurisdictions. There is no doubt that they are present in a number of cases in New Zealand. Personally I believe that the convictions of Peter Ellis and John Barlow also need to be reviewed, but to go further, I am convinced that Scott Watson is entirely innocent of the killing of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope in the Marlborough Sounds in 1997.
Whether he will get a chance to show it is another matter. Wrongful convictions are incredibly difficult to overturn, because of the design of our appeal system. Once a jury has convicted, appeals can only be, by and large, on points of law. There are good reasons for this, but it does mean that substantive problems do not get picked up in some cases.

The last resort in such cases is a petition to the Governor-General for a retrial or for a pardon. These are handled internally by the Ministry of Justice and the process is ad hoc and entirely unsatisfactory. That's why justice Thorp's main recommendation was for an independent Criminal Appeals Review Office, as exists in Canada and the United Kingdom. Many prominent lawyers, the Criminal Bar Association and the Law Society have all echoed Sir Thomas's call, especially in the wake of the Rex Haig and David Doherty cases. Parliament's Justice and Electoral Select Committee backed the idea after it looked into the petitions calling for an inquiry into the Peter Ellis case.

Justice shouldn't rely on the unpaid, some times personally costly, efforts of supporters to bring these stories to light. It's time a Criminal Appeal Review Office was introduced in New Zealand.

Tax changes we need

2009-05-15T12:41:00.004+12:00

It was the classic politician's trick – John Key promised you a tax cut and delivered a tax review instead. Inquiries, discussions, investigations and reviews: the refuge of scoundrel governments everywhere.

It's not technically a Government tax review of course. Its a Tax Working Group. But since Treasury seems to be the brains behind it, you'd be forgiven for thinking it's a political animal. I don't know how important the promise of a tax cut was to National winning the election, but going by the column inches that the media devoted to it, you'd have to conclude very.

I suspect it was actually more a diffused sense of irritation that really put paid to Clark's Labour government, and anyway, National has to be commended for pulling back from any rash pre-election promises in the face of a global recession. Still, a tax review is a useful way of saying that it's the thought that counts, and they are still thinking about it.

Actually, this might turn out to be an astoundingly cunning plan, because there is a way that this review could provide a ticket to tax trimming of titanic proportions. Looking at the mug shots though, I'm not sure that the working group has the imagination.

The last tax review was the McLeod report of 2001. More than anything that report failed to take notice of the most basic 21st century reality: there are environmental limits to the economy, and they are coming up quick. There is an urgent need to transform the economy onto a sustainable footing.

One way to help do this is to make sure that environmental costs fall on those causing them. That rarely happens today. If a business can pass on costs to the environment, and therefore to the community, it usually will. This is what people mean when they talk about environmental externalities – costs fall on people external to the business causing the damage or depletion.

There are a number of ways to stop this corporate freeloading (internalise the externalities). One is to add a tax equal to the unpaid social and environmental cost. That's the kind of thing a carbon tax does – it takes the cost off taxpayers and puts it on those causing the problem. This means that the true cost is being paid, leading to less environmental bads and more environmental goods. It should also go hand in hand with cuts in income tax (that is the bit that Cullen left out of the carbon tax proposals).

The Tax Working Group is made up of corporate notables, including Rob McLeod who chaired the last review. The group has already been criticised for its uniformity, but what worries me is that there don't appear to be any environmental economists (or accountants) among them. Gareth Morgan is on the group and he seems to like nature, and is knowledgeable on things like climate change, but I haven't yet heard him connect tax policy with the environment. It would be a real tragedy if the working group is so full of 'taxation experts' that it cannot see beyond technical refinements.

Finance Minister Bill English certainly understands the benefits of internalising environmental externalities. It is one way that National could demonstrate better environmental credentials than Labour, by showing how a market based approach to solving environmental problems can be more effective than regulation. When the Greens signed their Memorandum of Understanding with the Government a month or so ago, tax policy was unsurprisingly not on it, but I'm hoping that the Greens aren't too sidetracked by the shenanigans in Mt Albert to raise the topic.

Because while I harbour fantasies of a cunning and secret plot hatched between National and the Greens to green the NZ economy, I'm not holding my breath. I am, however, hoping that sooner rather than later we get a government that understands that environmental concerns must be more than a clip-on to pretty things up after the big decisions have been made. We have to make the environment integral to our thinking at all stages, and we have to start now. Let's hope this tax review won't be another missed opportunity to do that.

(from my Waikato Times column today)

2009-05-10T15:48:00.007+12:00

I spent most of last week at the tangi of Ngahuia's koro Percy Marunui Murphy. The tangi was in Murupara at Rangitahi, the marae of Ngati Hui hapu of Ngati Manawa.

As well as getting the chance to hear more about the life of this extraordinary man - decorated Maori Battalion veteran, first Maori Mayor and entrepreneur - it was also an opportunity to get to know people from the town. Murupara has a pretty rough reputation, and features among the most deprived areas of the country, but I found a warm and generous people with a lot of get up and go. In particular the students of Te Kura Kaupapa o Tawhiuau were outstanding and huge respect must go to all the administrators and kaiako. I also heard about a number local initiatives, such as the organic community gardens, all examples of people working to build resilience and self reliance in the face of adversity.

Murupara used to be a thriving little town, but the forestry sell off of the 80's left most of the town out of work. Young people either face long term unemployment or they leave their ancestral lands to find work elsewhere. The people I met over the week showed me that there is still plenty of potential though.

I also learned a bit about making a hangi - not exactly a vegetarians dream but good mahi all the same.

what's up with Kiwibank?

2009-05-01T17:33:00.005+12:00

At the risk of sounding like 'grumpy of Waingaro' I have to ask what decade Kiwibank thinks it is in?

Actually, its kind of ironic because I was just talking with one of my economics lecturers about some of the obstacles to increased productivity in NZ - which I think in this case was econ speak for bloody annoying stupidity that wastes everyone's time.

Anyway, the story is that I went to deposit a cheque into my 6 yr old daughters savings account. It was a birthday gift from her grandparents, who live in England.

The woman at the desk seemed to think this was a significant challenge and requiring of rigorous scrutiny. So, the cheque needed to be countersigned by the recipient. Well, ok, Pirimaia does know how to write her name, but, y'know, its hardly a consistent mark of authenticity. Anyway, why?

"Oh, well you are not the person it is made out to, so the recipient has to endorse it to show that you're not misusing the cheque".

"But I'm trying to put it into HER account. I'm not trying to put it into mine".

"Well, you are doing the right thing, but its just in case you're not"

So they rang head office for advice, to deal with this unsolvable dilemma presented by a father trying to put a cheque, made out to his daughter, into her account. The resolution was that as a guardian, I could countersign the cheque!!!

So I can't just put it into her account, but if I sign the back, I can?

This operation took about 45 minutes. It was one of the more bizarre and pointless exercises of the day (yeah, I don't have to go to question time anymore). I wonder how often Kiwibank has to deal with situations like this, because I would have thought it's pretty common.

So I'm going to boost my personal productivity by moving her account to TSB.

Selling off the bases

2009-04-26T17:39:00.002+12:00

Who would sell off their house and then rent it back from the new owner? Well maybe if you can't pay the mortgage, but what sensible person would liquidate an asset to take on a bill?

That is what the Government is proposing to do with our military bases. Announcing the first defence review since 1997, Minister Wayne Mapp and ACT's associate Minister Heather Roy said both parties support 'public-private partnerships'. PPP's are usually about getting the private sector to help build things, like the Orewa toll road. This is more like flicking off public assets to your mates.

It kind of reminds me of the Big Sell-Off of the 1980's and 90's. That, of course, is part of ACT's raison d'etre, but I didn't think Wayne Mapp was that kind of guy. He's too cuddly, like Mole from 'Wind in the Willows'. Still, while Wayne Mapp was not an MP when National took office in 1990, much of National's front bench were key players in the liquidation sale. Whether or not Mapp is an ideologue of the same ilk, he is certainly a compliant team member. His willingness to be appointed 'Political Correctness Eradicator' by Don Brash clearly demonstrated that.

Is it just a coincidence that the review panel includes the chair of the Business Roundtable? Rob McLeod is an strong advocate for more private sector involvement in those things usually provided by democratically accountable bodies, such as town planning, education, health and roading. The review of taxation that he led in 2001 notably called for special low tax rates for foreign firms and capping taxes for the super rich. It also let corporations off the hook for their environmental costs, by ignoring ecological taxation issues. His appointment is a pretty clear indication of what the Government wants out of the review.

Now maybe I'm just not economically savvy enough to understand why selling off capital assets is a good thing. I don't understood the wisdom of currency speculation and futures trading independent of the needs of actual production either. Bundling up sub prime mortgages and selling them as securities never made sense to me, even when they were making money rather than knocking holes in banks. I guess I'm unsophisticated.

Certainly too unsophisticated for the influx of Aucklanders into Hamilton last weekend. Like many of my friends I had to flee the city to escape the V8's. I realise that watching car racing is popular, I just can't figure out why.

Much more interesting to me are the attempts by Hamilton City Council to green the V8's. As an MP when Hamilton was first proposed to host the race, I met with then Mayor Redman to talk about how we could make the V8's less damaging. The council had been working on a number of ideas already and we were able to come up with some good proposals.

Last year, the council spent most of its efforts 'baselining' the event, to understand what the full environmental impacts were. It wasn't so much the races themselves as the travel of spectators, the rubbish, water runoff, energy uses etc. This year I look forward to seeing the council publicly report on what it did to actually reduce those impacts.

I'm a simple small businessman, but it seems pretty obvious to me – liquidating capital, whether built or environmental, is a recipe for failure.

Deep ecology workshop

2009-04-20T21:17:00.003+12:00

I spent the weekend at Solscape in Raglan, an awesome eco retreat run by two really lovely people, Phil and Bernadette. They were the hosts for a deep ecology workshop run by Daniel Nepia and Finn Mackesy. For those who have not heard of it, it is a process developed by Joanna Macy and John Seed to address the despair and burnout among environmental activists, but it has application to anyone who wishes to have an experiential emotional reconnection with the natural world and who seeks to reconnect with their inner wisdom and power. Hence it is also called "the work that reconnects'.

As a participant, I found it to be a very powerful series of processes that took participants out of their ego seperateness, deep into their inner world to experience and express their authentic emotional reaction to the state of the world we live in. The facilitators used various tools to empower people with their own wisdom and reconnect them with nature, culminating in a 'council of all beings'.

Daniel and Finn have been the only people running deep ecology workshops in the North Islnd for a number of years but now they are seeking to train new facilitors. That means that opportunities to participate will increase over the next few years. If you get a change, I totally recommend you go.

House bus - exterior

2009-04-08T20:58:00.005+12:00

Thought I'd post some photos of my house, because it's road legal (got a COF) and the roof line is about to change drastically.

Housebus interior

2009-04-08T20:35:00.004+12:00

We bought it as a school bus, removed the seats, stripped it to the frame and rust proofed it. We removed and resealed the winows, insulated it, relined with ply and built it from scratch - of course all the walls are non square and have curves in them!

A greenwing response to private prison debate

2009-03-25T17:41:00.002+13:00

Most people probably don't care who runs the prisons – as long as it includes flogging - yet few issues highlight the political divide so well.

The Right believes that any business can be run more efficiently by the private sector and prisons are no exception. The Left believes that some things are not like any other business, and jails are one of them. Only the State should be allowed to lock people in cages.

The problem with the second argument is that the public prison system is a shambles. The problem with the first is that corporations have proven just as good at messing things up as any Government.

Having said that, I think the best run prison the country has seen was the Auckland Central Remand Prison (ACRP) when it was run by Australasian Correctional Management (now Geotech) - a private prison operator. OK, it was a brand new (Government built) facility. It didn't take sentenced prisoners, so the dynamics were quite different, and its contractual obligations were different from those of public prisons.

What impressed me, though, was the needs assessments on new inmates, at a time when the infamous Integrated Offender Management System was barely functioning in the public system. What also impressed was the leadership of its outstanding General Manager Dom Karauria.

As an aside it is interesting that a number of experienced Maori managers have done well with Australian private prison operators. They don't seem to face the same institutional barriers, or maybe Australian prison companies just value a Maori perspective.

Even so, it is hard to escape the suspicion that ACRP was a kind of loss leader for Geotech. The usual experience of private prisons internationally is somewhat different. It is a huge international industry, dominated by a small number of very large players. Few of them are free from allegations of abuse and mistreatment of inmates in at least some of their facilities.

In addition there is the corrupting influence of the private prison sector on public policy. The huge money to be made from locking people up ensures a powerful lobby aimed at expanding the size of the teat. Media debate around law and order issues is already sensationalist and shallow – imagine the effect of adding big money to the mix.

There is a third, Green, option between big money and big state. In this context, it means going back to 1989, to the most comprehensive assessment ever done on the NZ prison system. The Roper Report made a number of important findings and recommendations, and it has been ignored by Governments both Right and Left ever since.

Criminals could not be rehabilitated, it said, if they had never been habilitated in the first place. It recommended small scale habilitation centres, with intensive, often confrontational, therapy to address the causes of offending. Sentenced prisoners would be assessed for suitability and people not suitable, or trying to play the system, would stay in a general prison.

The Public Prison Service is not well suited to running these kinds of operations. Neither is the multinational prison industry. They are both better at running sausage factories. Habilitation centres are suited to relatively small commercial and community operations, and they offer enormous scope for effective and innovative programs. They allow Tangata Whenua, Pasific Island or other groups to address particular cultural or religious needs. The tragedy of the public vs private prison debate is that this kind of solution gets lost in the fray.

(reprinted from my Waikato Times column)

Where to now for the Greens?

2009-02-27T19:10:00.001+13:00

The political press has come a long way since 2005. When Rod Donald passed away it seemed that, for the media at least, the only good Green was a dead one. Overnight he went from being naive and dangerous to an astute political strategist, without whom the Green Party was finished. The inconvenient healthiness of the party has been a warning to tea leaf readers ever since.

So it was good to see a more circumspect reaction to the resignation of Jeanette Fitzsimons as Green co-leader. Speculation has turned, not to the demise of the party, but to its next steps. In choosing between Sue Bradford and Metiria Turei the party has an important strategic decision to make. Members know that the party's fortunes do not rest on one person alone, but that the wrong choice of successor would be most unfortunate.

It is a good time to be choosing. Jeanette's announcement may have been hastened by an inconvenient leak to the Sunday Star Times, but it's clear that she had been planning for some time to announce her resignation around now. It leaves plenty of room for a good leadership contest, with time to mop up any fall-out before the next election.

The challenges before the new co-leader will be considerable. The contest itself will be long and hard. Green leaders are chosen by the membership rather than, as in most parties, by just the MP's, but it is a delegated vote. This means that the sympathies of branch office holders, as well as the broader membership, are crucial in a tight contest.

The challenges once they become leader will be greater. Jeanette is widely respected and highly regarded, with a strong appeal among both fiery militants and cautious reformers. She brought intellectual weight to the Greens, with solid hard work along with the ability to be quick on her feet.

But the Greens don't need just more of the same. Jeanette and Rod Donald were in many ways a perfect match. Rod: the brilliant tactician and media fiend,, the team builder, the warm and charismatic attractor. Jeanette: the strategist, the intellectual steel, colder and more formidable. Since Rods death that balance has not been found. The question is not so much who can fill Jeanette's shoes, as who can do the best three legged race with the smart but brash Russel Norman. Someone strategic rather than tactical, but warm and charismatic, an attractor and uniter.

There are two things that the Greens need to do to become powerful rather than just necessary. The first is to build a team. The Green MP's have proven to be effective campaigners in their separate areas, but struggle for a coherent message. Ask anyone what they stand for, and the reply (once you get beyond “the environment”) is liable to be a grab bag of discrete issues rather than a clear philosophical position. A co-leader who can pull the threads together rather than just fight their corner could unlock enormous synergy.

The second thing needed is to describe a distinctly Green political space to attract a new generation of environmentally minded unaligned voters. Until the Greens redefine the main political divide, away from 'Capital / Labour' to 'Sustainable / Unsustainable', they will always be fighting on someone else's ground. There are few votes to be found left of Labour, as the Alliance found out, and even those will mostly disappear when Labour in opposition seeks to claim them back.

The strategic direction of the Greens over the next decade will determine whether the last election result was a spring tide or a symptom of their sea level rising. In that sense, this co-leadership contest is crucial.

(printed Waikato Times 27/2/09)

Tsvangirai sworn in as ZImbabwean PM

2009-02-12T01:09:00.003+13:00

Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has been sworn in as Zimbabwe's PM by Robert Mugabe. According to Al Jazeera the stalemate over control of ministries and the security forces was settled by an agreement which saw Mugabe and Tsvangirai name co-ministers to the Home Affairs ministry and the creation of a new National Security Council.

It seems to me that whoever is the nominal co-head of the Home Affairs ministry, factional loyalties will determine how effective Tsvangirai and his colleagues will be. Mugabe was kept in power by the loyalty of the security forces and the war of independence veterans. Tsvangirai's demand that all political detainees be freed before Wednesday's ceremony was ignored by Mugabe's government and it's hard to think that this is not an indication of how things will run.

On the other hand, some recent reports indicate that even among the security personnel, the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy and the subsequent food crisis (and now the health crisis following the outbreak of cholera) is having a toll. That loyalty may be fragmenting.

Here's hoping that Mugabe's support is splintering enough to allow Tsvangirai the space to get some things done but I'm not holding my breath.

Catherine Delahunty big up yaself

2009-02-12T00:46:00.005+13:00

I didn't get to watch it, but I have just read Catherine Delahunty's maiden speech. It was magnificent. Full of poetry and love, full of fire and anger, she stood up in the House to challenge power and privilege in her own fearless, peerless way. She will be a formidable presence.
Catherine, we've had our ups and downs, we've had our disagreements, but I give thanks for your being in the world. JaH blessings and I-tection as you walk this path.

Ill conceived criminal law? Just the usual thanks

2009-02-11T10:29:00.004+13:00

After having a laugh at Clayton Cosgrove below, I thought I'd better go have a look at what he is talking about. Two bills stuck out.

The first is the Gangs and Organised Crime Bill. Going by the press release, it seems like a typical case of throwing good legislative time after bad. Justice Minister Simon Power says "“By doubling the sentence for participation in a gang we are reflecting the culpability of those gang leaders who organise the manufacture and distribution of methamphetamine, and we are addressing the low rate of successful convictions".

Eh? It appears that selling P is a worse crime if you are a Mongrel Mob member than if you are an evil sociopath with no friends. Not quite sure why. Nor am I sure why doubling the sentence will increase the number of convictions. (The release says that "of 339 prosecutions there were only 19 convictions" which I guess highlights either how poorly thought out the original legislation was or how incompetent the police are).

They ARE lowering the threshold for the police to get warrants, from investigation of offenses attracting 10 years to ones attracting 7. Of course if this is about targeting P as the Minister claims then this is irrelevant because manufacture and sale of P has a maximum of life.

Actually, it is already very easy for police to get warrants if they have a scrap of evidence to base an application on. The police always moan to politicians that the reason why they can't get on top of gangs is because they are hobbled by pesky laws protecting civil rights. So politicians give police more powers, and shortly thereafter the police are back with the same complaint. That is how civil rights are consistently and continuously undermined. Just have a look at the new campaign to give police yet more powers over boy racers.

All in all, much as it grieves me to agree with Mr Cosgrove, it looks like political theatre gone bad. Sir Graham Latimer got it right when he said that the quickest way to destabilise gangs is to legalise cannabis.

The other bill is about DNA samples.From the press release:

"It allows police to collect DNA from people they ‘intend to charge’, and to match it against samples from unsolved crimes. At present, DNA can be collected only with consent, by judicial approval, or by compulsion where people are suspected or convicted of an offence punishable by more than seven years’ imprisonment, or another specified offence"

So it is about giving the police the right to take DNA from anyone they wish (I intend to charge you....when I've got some evidence) and to use that for a fishing trip through the DNA database.

"And any misuse of profiles will be subject to the full extent of relevant law and civil rights protections, and the police will develop guidelines to avoid any arbitrary or unreasonable application of this power".

Just like they did with Tazers, MoDA search without warrant powers, pepper spray right? Somehow I don't feel comforted.

Cosgrove forgets he's in opposition

2009-02-11T09:57:00.006+13:00

Scoop is running a press release apparently from the New Zealand Government, headlined "National is writing law and order bills on the run". It's from Hon Clayton Cosgrove, Labour's law and order spokesperson.

I don't know if he snoozed right through election, or simply can't conceive of a world in which they are not the Government anymore, but you'd have thought someone would have picked up the mistake. The amusing thing though is seeing Clayton Cosgrove, author of boy racer legislation, saying things like "National appears more interested in political theatre than constructive debate". I remember very clearly watching Clayton's performance in the House and 'constructive debate' was not his MO! In fact his primary strategy for building political support is to kick anyone he thinks is unpopular.

SIS - saving us from ourselves

2009-02-10T15:11:00.006+13:00

The SIS has been getting some uncomfortable attention recently. Late last year saw the exposure of informant Rob Gilchrist, who had been spying on various activists groups - including targeting my own office when I was an MP. While he was run by the Police Special Investigations Group, it would be surprising if the SIS were not recipients of information gathered by him, and some suspicion fell on them at the time.

(Actually, it wouldn't be that surprising if they saw nothing from it. The various branches of the US 'intelligence' services and law enforcement are renown for their infighting and sabotage of one another)

More recently attention has been on the files kept by the SIS on Green MP Keith Locke since the age of 11. A number of people have expressed outrage about surveillance of a sitting MP (although unsurprisingly not Kiwiblog and friends).

It is true that SIS surveillance of an MP both undermines parliamentary democracy and cuts across his work as foreign affairs spokesperson for the Greens. It is especially bad in that 55 years of files have turned up no evidence of illegal activity or anything other than a strong social conscience and a determination to do something to make the world a better place.

In my mind it highlights a fundamental polarity. Some people see it as totally legitimate for the SIS to spy on people who disagree with the government. They see the order of things as basically good, and anyone wanting to change things in any fundamental way as subversive and dangerous. Of course they are right - such people are threatening to the vested interests that benefit from the status quo.

Others see it as illegitimate for the 'intelligence' machinery to target people simply because they are active in making change. As long as they aren't plotting armed insurrection, basically, they should be left alone to go about their democratic business. This view sees dissent as the lifeblood of democracy, not its nemesis.

Part of the problem seems to be the limited world-view of many in the intelligence community. Judging by the simplistic and naive analysis of information that appears standard (though its hard to really tell because access to such analysis is obviously limited) any radical thinking does appear subversive rather simply critical.

Of course it really boils down to whether you think the state is there (or should be) to preserve the status quo on behalf of the powerful and wealthy, or there to represent the interests of the people. I don't think we can get past the fact that MPs, cops, judges etc currently swear allegience to the Queen. They are not allowed to swear either to the people of New Zealand, or to our most important constitutional document Te Tiriti o Waitangi. As one who will be happy to see the Crown of England melt in the fire, I guess I'd better see what the SIS is keeping on me!

Adventure on the High Seas

2009-02-10T14:55:00.005+13:00

For all supporters of Sea Shepherd, the Centre for Cetacean Research has kindly posted photos of the Steve Irwin ramming Japanese whaling ship Yushin Maru No.2 in the Antarctic.

I guess the purpose was to garner sympathy, but I suspect that it will just provide wallpaper for activists laptops. It certainly isn't reasonable to ram other people's boats, but I think that many people now believe that the time for reasonableness is over. Certainly Japans tactics in IWCC meetings has firmed up the resolve of anti-whaling activists.

Given the way some in New Zealand still see trashing the environment as appropriate behaviour, I wonder when we will see a more militant form of direct action returning to these shores.

Culinary imperialism?

2009-02-05T22:16:00.003+13:00

Campell Live had a story tonight about Elly Maynard. She is the founder of Sirius GAO and is campaigning to ban the eating of dogs in the Philippines.

I've seen some video about the dog trade that still makes me shudder. Admittedly that was from China, but the footage on Campbell suggested that it's pretty horrendous in the Philippines too. Elly is raising money to buy dogs being sold for food so she can rehabilitate them, and pressuring the Philippine Government to ban the eating of dogs. I find it hard to support her.

If people want to give money to buy and rehabilitate dogs that's their choice, but I'm not sure that artificially stimulating the market like this is a wise way to go about stopping the practice. It is just going to raise demand and make it even more profitable – a sure way to guarantee that it continues either legally or illegally.

Secondly, I really find it objectionable for a New Zealander to be campaigning to ban the eating of dog, simply because in NZ culture we don't eat dog, we keep them as pets. We do eat cows, sheep, pigs, chickens and a host of other animals. Just because Elly Maynard has pet dogs doesn't give her the right to decide the culinary practices of Filipinos.

Now I'm basically a vegetarian. I find the eating of pigs, for example, just as objectionable. They are easily as intelligent and as sensitive as dogs. I don't understand why Elly Maynard thinks eating pigs is ok, but eating dogs is not, nor why she thinks she has the right to dictate to Filipinos what they can eat in their own country.

In any case banning the trade will ensure that treatment gets worse, not better. In my mind the focus should more properly be on the terrible conditions that the dogs are kept in, and the cruel way they are killed. If the trade was properly regulated, with animal welfare standards, then cruelty could be addressed without forcing Filipinos to give up a traditional food.

Actually dog is a traditional food for many people. A number of peoples in Europe have a history of eating dog. Similarly in Asia and in Polynesia.

The real question in my mind is, why be campaigning in Asia when the treatment of pigs and chickens in this country is equally vile? Not to mention vivisection.

Rastafari reasoning in Christchurch

2009-01-29T01:32:00.005+13:00

I am in Christchurch for a few days, taking part in a spoof of Gordon Ramsey's 'Hells Kitchen" for Childrens TV show 'What now'. There's no real cooking involved, just kids slapstick humour but its kind of fun.

I got to catch up with DJs Nazarite and Dubwise when they played their regular wednesday gig at the Dux. It was upfull to sit and reason with the brothers, who I haven't seen for maybe 6 or so years, and to catch up with news of Papa Levi, who has just put out a new album. Ben the Nazarite hooked me up with a load of new CDs to check out, but I'm really looking forward to the release of the album Dubwise is working on, featuring a heap of top Jamaican and other reggae stars, including some up and comers like 'Elephant wise', a Kenyan brother living in Australia.

I&I were reasoning about how pleasant it would be to see I&I come together for an Aotearoa grounation - to fully establish who I&I are in these islands, to focus on our commonalities rather than our differences, and to begin to look at how I&I can organise and work together.

Blessings to the Rastafari community on the World of Jah website, especially Elders like Ras Flako for the inspiring words pointing I&I forward.

How can the Palestinians be free?

2009-01-23T21:39:00.003+13:00

Professor of Middle Eastern History, Mark LeVine, has written an informed and thoughtful piece about the Palestinian freedom struggle. He addresses a question that has been in my mind for some time: Given the low probability of the Palestinians defeating Israel militarily, and the disproportionate Israeli response to Palestinian resistence, where on earth can the Palestinians go, strategically?

In addition, even with an independent Palestine, how could a state geographically divided and surrounded by Israel be viable?

LeVine puts forward the abandonment of a two state solution, and a mass movement nonviolent campaign as the only viable way forward. His column is well worth a read.

For myself, I know there are people in places like NZ who still fail to be moved by the plight of the Palestinian people, even after seeing the slaughter and destruction wrought upon them in this latest invasion of Gaza. I do not really understand why. I long admired the stamina, the persistence and the sheer bloody mindedness of the Israeli people in their fight for the survival of their nation. But I have become ashamed for them, for how their nation grinds the faces of the suffering Palestinian people in the dirt. I have become contemptuous of the claim of their Governments and people to desire peace, seeing these kinds of Israeli attacks and the soaring polls that result.

I know there are Israeli's who do truly desire peace. They understand Peter Tosh's point when he sang against those who do not also cry out for justice. I also know there are Palestinians who see the futility of sending glorified sky rockets and kids with bombs against Israeli citizens. Whether you agree with him or not, LeVine does us all a service by examining some other possibilities.

Another view on Obama

2009-01-22T13:16:00.001+13:00

Glen Ford, the executive editor of Black Agenda Report, gives a critical analysis of the promise of Obama in Aljazeera .

He makes a number of interesting points, in particular about Obama's plans to boost the American military presence in Afghanistan (even while planning to withdraw from Iraq and promising in his inaugural speech to have a less aggressive foreign policy). The Taliban is warning Obama to learn the lessons of Bush, and before him the Soviets (they might have added the British before that).

As Dr Martin Luther King recognised, military escapades are generally incompatible with progressive social programmes because of the huge resources they suck up. (A reminder of the old poster about looking forward to the day when the airforce has to run a cake stall to buy a new bomber seems inevitable at this point).

Of course Ford presents some of the reasons why even those of us very happy to see Obama's election, and inspired by his oratory, have nagging worries. He seems to be surrounding himself with conservative advisors and staff, in general. This raises concerns not just about how they may argue against, and place obstacles in the way of, progressive change, but also about who will run things if anything does happen to him. Popping him off would seem less tempting to the CIA / Mafia types if they thought his VP would be even more dangerous to their interestsl.

In addition, his position on Palestine is not promising for Palestinians. It seems to me a positive step would be to start talking to the democratically elected representatives of the Palestinian people, Hamas, rather than just Abbas. Otherwise it looks like America wants the world to have democracy, but only if they vote for approved candidates.

Having said all that, his immediate agenda, set out on the first day, has a number of positive elements. I think that what he will do is create more space for activists to organise and for people to live their lives. I'm still hopeful.

Celebrating Barack Hussein Obama

2009-01-21T12:58:00.003+13:00

I stayed up all night to watch Barack Obama's inauguration. Actually I meant to get up at 4.30am but ended up messing around on the computer for so long that I decided I might as well not go to bed. I was a bit fuzzy when I turned on the TV but listening to his speech changed all that.

It seems extraordinary to say it, but watching US President Barack Obama talk to America, and the world, has given me a new hope. Maybe I've been distracted by his glamour, maybe I'm deluded, but I feel the potential for a new way forward. I guess what has surprised me is not just that America, a country founded on racism and slavery, could elect an African as leader. That is something I never thought I would see in this lifetime. But on reflection it seems just as astounding that it could elect someone with humility.

I stayed up to watch because the election of the first black American president was too big a historical moment to miss. What riveted me was listening to him talk. It seemed like, in a nation that is obsessed with religion, we were finally seeing a leadership demonstrating true Christ-like values. That he acknowledged the Muslims, Hindus and atheists present just reinforced that.

What did he say? He denounced wanton violence as a tool of foreign policy. He held out his hand to the poor, pledging to work to bring justice to the world. He warned rich nations that their greed must come to an end. He spoke of hard times ahead, and the desire that America be a leader by its example rather than through the might of its armies. He spoke of the need to address climate change and economic recession.

Maybe his words will all prove hollow. Maybe America will continue to be the rapacious imperial power that we have come to know and despise. Maybe nothing will change. But if Obama is true to his words, then such humble leadership could turn the world around. Could his example persuade the rich countries to forgo greed and start to work for the common good of us all when nations meet at Copenhagen to address global warming? I pray so.

Wanted: an independent Green Party

2009-01-20T17:12:00.003+13:00

This is my column, published in the Waikato Times on January 12:

The summer break is usually a good time for the Greens. People have been away from work, with time to think about more than the daily grind. They go to the beach and maybe reflect on the lack of kai moana (sea food) or whether there is faeces in the water. That will be cold comfort to the Green Party this year. Some people won big when National took the election (or at least felt satisfaction at sticking it to Labour) but it looks like the environment will be the big loser.

The same cannot be said for Maori. John Key met tribal leaders immediately after the election and invited the Maori Party to talk. It was an astute move to pull ACT's teeth, but it also reflects a generational attitude shift. There are great risks, for both sides, but it is already paying off, with two Maori Party ministers and a new focus on Treaty settlements. This would never have happened under Labour. In return, John Key has had the doors to te ao Maori opened to him, as evidenced at Pukawa Marae.

Did the Maori Party get only the shiny wrappings of power and no actual presents, as some suggest? Their relationship agreement contains few policy points. The Greens' experience with Labour suggests everything needs to be in writing and signed in blood. Even then Labour would claw it back. Pita Sharples and Tariana Turia may find it hard to deliver much, if National plays the same game. Yet their agreement starts with the importance of the relationship. In the end it will be about whether Mr Key, and his Cabinet, is serious about that.

There is no relationship for the Greens, however. National has already got rid of the biofuel obligation on petrol companies, and new green investments and jobs have disappeared as a result. The Government's position on climate change is dangerously myopic. ACT (always critical when other people waste money) has demanded a special select committee, hoping to challenge the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its thousands of scientists. The result of this farce: business uncertainty, investments cancelled and valuable time wasted.

National itself is treating climate change negotiations like a trade negotiation, trying to get sweet deals and special favours for New Zealand. These are not trade negotiations. They are an attempt to co-ordinate an international effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, for the good of all people (actually all species) now and for the foreseeable future.

But then National is not an environmental party. It is the Green Party's job to influence governments on the issues that count and why would National listen to them? The Greens made it very clear in the election campaign that they were not interested in talking to National.

I thought at the time that it was an extraordinarily stupid thing to do, to fasten your lifeboat to a sinking ship. Greens do best when there is an outgoing Labour Government, but this election the results were disappointing. The Green Party might well have won their biggest caucus yet, if they had been prepared to stop licking Labour's hand.

There is a question of whether National would have paid any attention to them anyway. Senior National MPs were privately hinting so early last year and Mr Key's approach to the Maori Party indicates a new openness. There was never a better time for the Greens to see if they could forge a new political space, genuinely independent of Labour and National. Unfortunately for us all, they lacked the courage to try.